An editorial in today's New York Times discusses the "disturbing reality" that handguns make suicide easier. "Firearms are a far more lethal means of suicide than other options. They are fatally effective in 85 percent of cases, while pill overdoses succeed only 2 percent of the time, according to the Harvard Injury Control Research Center," the Times frets. "More precaution is certainly needed…. Along with more effective controls at the federal level, individual owners must institute foolproof controls at home if some of their most vulnerable loved ones are not to be left open to self-destruction."
Elsewhere in today's Times, a news article headlined "Vermont: Senate Advances Bill for Cases in Which Patients Choose to End Lives," begins: "The State Senate gave final approval on Thursday to a measure that would exempt doctors from criminal or civil liability when treating terminally ill patients who choose to end their lives. Any person present during the self-administration of a lethal dose of legally prescribed medication would also be exempted. The legislation, known as a 'death with dignity' measure..."
There's no editorial in the Times condemning the Vermont bill, and in fact, back in 2006, a Times editorial headlined "The Assisted-Suicide Decision" praised similar legislation enacted in Oregon as a "pioneering effort to let terminally ill patients end their own lives humanely." The 2006 editorial criticized opposition to the Oregon law by saying the opponents were attempting to impose "religiously conservative ideology."
Well, no matter what one's view of religiously conservative ideology is, the Times' treatment of this one sure distills secular left-wing ideology to a pure hypocrisy, in which suicide with a gun is bad, but suicide with "a lethal dose of legally prescribed medication" is humane and pioneering. It's clear that what really bothers the Times isn't suicide, but guns, and that the suicide argument isn't really being made out of any principled opposition to suicide, but is just another way for the Times to go after guns.