The New York Times front page editorial is more than just opinion

"End the Gun Epidemic in America."

On Friday, The New York Times published a front page editorial, its first since 1920, under this unequivocal headline. In the article, the paper's editorial board called for American politicians and policymakers to take concrete action to end the mass shootings that occur with alarming frequency in this country.

Our country's most passionate defenders of gun rights will likely see this decision as the mainstream media's liberal bias rearing its ugly head once again. Those people are wrong.

Newspapers have a responsibility to be neutral and to represent all perspectives, regardless of their writers' and editors' personal beliefs. What they do not have a responsibility to do, however, is cede space in their pages to arguments that, at their core, promote violent or hateful behavior. Doing so would be tantamount to the paper endorsing these ideas as worthy of legitimate consideration.

The problem of guns and gun control in the United States is one such issue -- it is no longer a story with two sides. To simply accept gun violence in America as the natural state of things is to tacitly endorse the murders occurring each and every day across the country. In running this editorial on the front page, the Times made the kind of statement newspapers often do not for fear of being labeled biased and partisan. The paper’s editorial board used the paper’s front page -- a powerful platform even in this age of declining print journalism -- to argue that American politicians who take no action when faced with these seemingly ceaseless horrors are complicit in the violence. They are part of the problem. For the Times to have pretended otherwise would have been a disservice to its readers and a violation of the role newspapers play in public discourse.

This is not to say that there is no room to quibble about the policy suggestions put forth by the Times. The editorial calls for bans on assault weapons, though according to a Sept. 12, 2014 Times article, smaller handguns kill the majority of Americans. Militarized assault weapons, like those used in San Bernadino, often receive heavy media attention because they are frequently the weapons of choice in mass shootings. But curbing gun violence will involve more than banning assault rifles. It is not just mass shootings that need to end, but the smaller, less publicized acts of violence -- the ones that occur in poor neighborhoods, the ones that disproportionately affect Black Americans. “[America’s high rate of gun murders] is fueled by a relentless drumbeat of deaths of black men,” wrote Lois Beckett in a Nov. 24 New Republic article. The national conversation about gun violence often excludes these stories. If the United States is to truly solve its gun epidemic, that must change. We cannot turn a blind eye to these people and their deaths.

The Times was undoubtedly limited in the policy changes it proposed. The decision to run the editorial itself and to run it on the front page, however, was an example of journalism at its most powerful and at its most responsible.