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As someone with scores of unsigned editorials under my belt and considerable doubt about the medium’s utility in today’s national conversation, I will admit to rolling my eyes at the breathless headlines greeting The New York Times’ Dec. 5 call for more gun control after the mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif. “New York Times runs first front-page editorial since 1920,” Slate announced. That’s “nearly 100 years,” NPR observed.

“Even in this digital age, the front page remains an incredibly strong and powerful way to surface issues that demand attention,” Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., told the journalism news site Poynter. “And, what issue is more important than our nation’s failure to protect its citizens?” The editorial sent “an incredibly strong and powerful” message, he insisted.

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The grieving parents MADD puts in their commercials don’t badger you not to drink, after all. They exhort you to change your behaviour.

Even if editorials can still turn a national conversation on its ear, this one certainly did not. It was more performance than argument — a rote, perfunctory restatement of the American left’s preferences on gun control, which for some reason they cannot see are hopeless.