Here’s an impressively dishonest headline in the Washington Post:

White bikers, black thugs: Why Texas looked to relax gun laws after biker shootout.

The supporting evidence?

While the rest of America tried to make sense Monday of the weekend shootout at the Waco Twin Peaks — and learned of a whole biker subculture featuring sometimes-violent turf wars — the Texas legislature debated a bill that would expand the rights of licensed gun owners to openly carry weapons in public. To be fair, this wasn’t the first time the Texas state Senate took up the matter of expanded gun rights. At the start of the legislative session in January, leaders in the Republican-controlled body identified an open-carry law as a legislative priority — a proposal that has been debated in one legislative committee or another ever since. And contrary to the state’s gun-loving, gun-slinging reputation, Texas is one of just six states that do not have a so-called “open carry law” on the books.


That ”to be fair” is doing an awful lot of work here. As the Post makes abundantly clear, Texas did not in fact look to do anything at all “after” the shootout — rather, this bill has been on the cards for five months (hell, Wendy Davis supported it!). Moreover, even if it had, Texas would not be looking to do anything out of the ordinary, but would instead be seeking to bring its laws into line with the rest of the country. What we are dealing with here is little more than a good old-fashioned coincidence.

Also doing a lot of work: the ”but” in the next paragraph:

But even in Texas, debating the merits of a bill that relaxes gun laws one day after nine people were killed in a shootout between rival biker gangs and police at a Waco restaurant seems oddly timed.



Not really, no. And why not? Well, because the question of open carry has precisely nothing to do with this shootout. Really, there is only one case that one can make in favor of gun control in this instance, and that is that if America had fewer guns in circulation this might not have happened. Everything else is opportunistic silliness. There is a good reason that nobody has attempted to make the case that this is the fault of a lack of background checks or of an overly permissive concealed carry regime or of the unwillingness of the people of Texas to prohibit so-called “assault weapons.” There is a good reason, too, that nobody has seriously proposed that the lack of open carry legislation helped to diminish the death toll. That reason? They aren’t related.

Motorcycle gangs, need I remind you, are full of outlaws who do not care what the rules are. It is certainly possible that if there were no firearms in America, criminals would not be able to get hold of the weapons they covet. It is not possible, however, that, by changing the manner in which the law-abiding are permitted to carry guns, the Texas legislature will liberate the criminal element. Of course Texas continued with its scheduled legislative business; it had no cause not to do so.

At the end of the passage, the Post rather gives the game away. This topic, it is suggested, is:

tailor-made for a “Daily Show” segment full of knowing jokes about America’s relationship with guns and the country’s singularly elevated gun death rate among wealthy nations.


How true these words are. So utterly flimsy is the case that is here being insinuated that only cynical conflation and cheap, sycophantic humor could successfully implant it into the front of the public’s mind.