The Gun Epidemic:
The Making of a Page 1 Editorial
By ANDREW ROSENTHALDEC. 7, 2015
Not long after the latest mass murder, in San Bernardino, Calif.,
on Dec. 2, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., our publisher, was on the phone with Terry
Tang, deputy editorial page editor, and me. What were we going to write about
the killings?
There was nothing particularly unusual
about this conversation. Arthur often discusses issues and news events with us,
since the editorial board represents The Times as an institution and Arthur is
its publisher. Arthur is particularly incensed about gun violence and the
nation’s failure to deal with it.
The day after the school massacre in Newtown, Conn.,
in December 2012, Arthur was in my office. Would it be possible, he asked, for
us to go bananas on guns for a while? (He actually used an earthier expression
than bananas.) I said yes, and mobilized our editorial writers. In the next
month, we published about 15 editorials on the subject of guns, gun violence
and gun regulation.
By last Thursday, as details of the carnage in California
emerged, Arthur had another, bolder idea: What if we did an editorial on the
front page? We later found out that this had not happened in almost 100 years.
The editorial and news departments are kept separate, and editorials go on the
editorial page.
We talked about the idea in some detail
last Thursday. On the con side, there was the argument about separation of news
and opinion. We also talked about the possibility, which later came to pass,
that the killers in San Bernardino could be Muslims with some kind of tie to
international terrorist groups, like the Islamic State, or at least sympathetic
to those groups and their sadistic agenda. Would a gun control editorial seem
appropriate?
But the big plus side was that it would
make a powerful statement by the Times editorial board and its publisher that
we’ve had enough and wanted to shout our frustration and anger from our rooftop, Page 1. Making it work regardless of who the
killers turned out to be was an issue of writing and editing.
Nothing was decided until Dean Baquet, the
executive editor, had a chance to consider the idea. He and Arthur discussed
it, and Dean thought a Page 1 editorial was a great idea. I was not present at
the discussion, nor should I have been.
Why in print? After all, our audience
online is bigger. But the old-fashioned notion of a printed paper still has
enormous power. We found that to be true last year, when we ran a series of
editorials calling for legalization of marijuana.
When other news media reported on that series, the illustration they most often
used was a photo of the cover of the Sunday Review, where we started it.
While Tom Bodkin, our design director,
worked on exactly how to put an editorial on the front page, we went to work on
what the editorial would say. We decided that it had to be powerful, and clear
and direct. It also had to be fairly short, because the space on Page 1 could accommodate only about 450 words.
In consultation
with Terry Tang and other members of the editorial team, I sat down to write
the editorial Friday morning. It mostly speaks for itself, but there are a
couple of points — about which we’ve received some queries
— that are worth addressing.
We felt it had to focus on the specific
issue of spree killings like the one in California, and earlier in Colorado Springs and so many other places,
and on two ideas that related to it.
The first was that it is not tolerable to
have an open, legal market on which would-be terrorists can easily amass an arsenal of
weapons that are so perfectly suited to their task. That might not have
prevented the San Bernardino
shooting (a common argument which we’ve heard a lot in recent days), but at
least we as a society would not have aided and abetted
it.
The second was that — as much as we support
other gun control measures and have written about them hundreds of times — it
was time to say that there are too many firearms
out there.
Background checks, bans relating to the
no-fly list, mental health screening, limits on magazine capacities, trigger
locks and many other good ideas that have been flatly rejected by the
Republicans in Congress would not reduce the number of firearms in circulation.
There are more guns than people in our country. We wanted to focus on this and
to issue a loud call to action. There was simply no room on the front page on
Saturday to list every good gun control idea.
We will have a lot more to say in coming
days and weeks about those ideas, and all the others that would help stem the
epidemic of gun violence. Sometimes it feels as if we are howling into a raging
storm, but that is our job on the editorial page — to say what we think is
right and hope we can at least spark some civil debate.
The response was overwhelming. The
readership of the editorial was enormous, and so was the volume of comments
from our readers. There were plenty of people who disagreed with us on
principle and in particulars, and did so forcefully. And there were,
predictably, some who just spewed hatred and hostility.
It’s interesting in a very sad way that
people who oppose gun control measures often resort to violent imagery to make
the point that they can be trusted to do the right thing with their firearms.
“Let me buy any gun I want to defend myself, or I’ll shoot you” is not a
rational argument.
Our publisher felt it was the right time to
make a big and loud statement about guns, and chose a bold and exciting way to
do it. That’s the kind of thing publishers are supposed to do.
Structure
of the lead:
Who- ANDREW ROSENTHAL
When- DEC. 7, 2015
What- editing a front page of newspaper
Why- people use guns everywhere and every time
Where- San Bernardino, Calif
How- not given
Keywords:
1. incense-激怒；使大怒
2. massacre-大屠殺
3. carnage-大屠殺
4. sadistic-殘酷成性的；虐待狂的
5. agenda-議程；行為事項
6. arsenal-軍火庫
7. marijuana-大麻毒品
8. accommodate-使適應
9. consultation-諮詢；參考
10. spree-狂飲作樂；放縱的行為
