NY Times claims gun rights advocates open carry ‘Suppresses Free Speech’… yet they fail to mention Antifa committing crimes while open-carrying at protests

The New York Times would never fabricate stories or perpetuate a false narrative.  Never.  Except for when they do like in “At Protests, Guns Are Doing the Talking.”  Their Democrat operative with a byline “reporter” Mike McIntire claims that pro-gun protesters are using open carry to intimidate others into not speaking against their “right-wing agenda.”

Of course, Mikey McIntire devotes nary a drop of digital ink about the recent events in Texas.  You know, those drag queen story time events where masked Antifa members dressed in Black Bloc tote rifles.  Antifa does this in an effort to illegally deny anti-grooming counter-demonstrators, with force, access to public spaces outside those events.

The NY Times story, hidden behind a paywall for most, opens with this:

Across the country, openly carrying a gun in public is no longer just an exercise in self-defense – increasingly it is a soapbox for elevating one’s voice and, just as often, quieting someone else’s.

This month, armed protesters appeared outside an elections center in Phoenix, hurling baseless accusations that the election for governor had been stolen from the Republican, Kari Lake.  In October, Proud Boys with guns joined a rally in Nashville where conservative lawmakers spoke against transgender medical treatments for minors.

If you think the next paragraph covered Antifa open-carrying to add balance, you’re far too naïve.  It doesn’t.  But we’ll pick up in the paragraph after that.

Whether at the local library, in a park or on Main Street, most of these incidents happen where Republicans have fought to expand the ability to bear arms in public, a movement bolstered by a recent Supreme Court ruling on the right to carry firearms outside the home.  The loosening of limits has occurred as violent political rhetoric rises and the police in some places fear bloodshed among an armed populace on a hair trigger.

Again, McIntire makes no mention of Antifa’s antics just a couple of weeks ago.  Or this one in August.  Or another event that ended with one dead Antifa thug and five more wounded in Portland after the Black Bloc boys and girls tried the play tough and rough with a motorcycle club.

Newsbusters dissects McIntire’s screed.

In a Saturday article headlined “At Protests, Guns Are Doing the Talking,” New York Times investigative reporter Mike McIntire accuses gun rights advocates with “a right-wing agenda” of “increasingly using open-carry laws to intimidate opponents and shut down debate” at protests, gatherings, and public meetings.

 There’s a legal term for what he’s describing and it’s called “brandishing”; a term that describes an illegal activity and does not appear once in his nearly 2,600-word piece.

The word doesn’t appear because he knows that’s not what’s happening. He even admits that “shootings were rare” and that “armed protests accounted for less than 2 percent” of total protests. But that admission didn’t come until paragraph 42 of 56. He would also admit that when the rare violence would break out it “often involved fisticuffs” with other groups “such as antifa [sic].”

“Across the country, openly carrying a gun in public is no longer just an exercise in self-defense — increasingly it is a soapbox for elevating one’s voice and, just as often, quieting someone else’s,” McIntire openly lamented in his opening paragraph.

Giving little credit to the fact that Democrats are openly anti-gun rights in many states, some even calling for abolishing the Second Amendment altogether, McIntire seems appalled that law-abiding gun owners find a home in the Republican Party. He treated the political partnership as some sort of cabal, seemingly finding it suspicious that “Republican officials or candidates appeared at 32 protests where they were on the same side as those with guns.”