Jumping To Conclusions

The New York Times writes a followup to a story about a federal prosecutor who was killed six months ago. Apparently there are no leads. Of course, you couldn't fill a whole article with that, so the Times has to find an angle. So they pick gun control.

There aren't any facts to relate the story to gun control, so the Times uses insinuation. The article starts by describing Mr. Wales as a "prominent advocate of gun control," and then says that "the attack had all the signs of a professional hit." Then we get the obligatory quotes from anti-gun activists:

National gun-control and gun-safety groups are also stepping up calls for progress in the investigation. Mr. Wales, they say, was by far the most prominent gun-control advocate to die from gun violence, and many leaders of those groups fear that his killing may have been tied to that work.

"It's terrifying for anybody working in this field to think there could be a killer out there targeting them," said Matt Bennett, director of public affairs for Americans for Gun Safety, a nonprofit group based in Washington, D.C.

And if that doesn't inflame the readers, the Times adds:

He was even singled out in an Internet discussion forum for gun proponents, described as "Tom Wales, yet another arrogant, gun-banning Jew, out in the open, unafraid." (Mr. Wales was not Jewish.)

The Internet forum is the Usenet newsgroup talk.politics.guns, and it is not "for gun proponents," but for a discussion of gun policy, for and against. And one single poster described him that way, but it fits the Times' perspective of gun owners as racist rednecks, so they feel obliged to mention it.

Anyway, after all that, seven paragraphs which set the victim up as a martyr to gun policy, the Times then finally admits that there's no real story there.

There is no firm indication that any opponent of gun control was involved in his death, and many pro-gun groups have expressed great ire at the suggestion. Moreover, Mr. Wales had also prosecuted many people in 18 years here in the United States attorney's office, specializing in fraud and white-collar crime. Investigators have been exhaustively combing over those cases, looking for anyone who could be a suspect.

Yeah, but isn't it far more sexy to insinuate that the killing is the work of a political group the Times hates?