OSD 315: The best new gun publication in 2025 is … The New York Times
The New York Times ran a profile of Rooftop Defense on Saturday. Here are some things that were not mentioned in the article:
Mass shootings
The word “assault”
The concept of gun control
Anything whatsoever about politics
On other topics, that wouldn’t be a surprise. A profile of The Hershey Company wouldn’t focus on what the American Dental Association thinks. But that’s the point. It’s rare, especially in the NYT, for guns to be treated like a regular business and addressed on their own terms. Most of the time, that kind of talk comes only after several paragraphs of disclaimers and throat clearing, lest the reader think this sort of thing is normal. That’s gun owner as cannibal — an anthropological curiosity, but obviously not one the reader, or the writer, can relate to.
The Rooftop Defense profile avoids that framing. It’s a straight-ahead news piece. Not cheerleading and not condemning. Not telling you what to think at all. Just telling you some facts.
This same thing happened in the NYT a month ago too, when they ran a piece called “How YouTube is Changing American Gun Culture”.
This is a change from the past. Previously, we’ve highlighted the paper as being particularly out of touch on guns:
So what happened? It’s pretty simple. They hired a writer for the gun beat — Thomas Gibbons-Neff — who knows about guns and wants to address the topic like he would any other. He wrote both of the recent pieces. Here’s Isaac Botkin interviewing him on the T.Rex Talk podcast:
So now instead of focusing on guns-as-politics, NYT readers are learning about things like KAC battery caps for Aimpoint sights (an anecdote from the Rooftop Defense profile covers how those battery caps sell out instantly).
And the shift is bigger than one writer. The paper ran a piece a few weeks ago (h/t David Yamane) titled “The Tipping Point: America’s newest gun owners are upending preconceptions about who buys a gun and why.”
There are two reasons it’s encouraging to see all this from the NYT:
They realized they had a gap, and they chose to fix it. The fact that they made that choice suggests a broader cultural shift.
Gun rights win when people learn about guns. We don’t need favoritism or cheerleaders. We just need people to see the facts in a neutral setting, and the rest will take care of itself.
This is progress. Revise your estimate upward for how much gun culture is going to be normalized in the next few years.
This week’s links
“Trigger Happy Harry”, NRA gun safety video from 1946
Thanks for David Yamane for pointing this one out. They’re big on muzzle discipline of course, but interesting that trigger discipline was not yet a concept.
By the way, David’s book Gun Curious came out a few months ago and is an great read, especially for people who are, well, gun curious.
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