New York Times Leaves Out Huge Chunk Of New Gun Owner’s Story To Preach Anti-2A Message

Earlier in 2026 a sub-Reddit called “r/liberalgunowners,” saw one user provide an update after describing a harrowing incident at home – but a New York Times columnist elected to leave out a large part of the story to deliver an anti-gun ownership spiel.

In the screenshot of the initial post on Reddit posted on X on March 2, according to BizPacReview, the user explained how his partner had purchased a Glock pistol “for self-defense as the federal government does fascist things in our community.” The Reddit user apparently provided additional updates later in the thread, based on another screenshot posted on X.

The Reddit user, who was familiar with rifles and shotguns, had no familiarity with the pistol, which makes what happened not very surprising, but still shocking. Per the original post, the Reddit user’s partner had an “accidental discharge” while practicing loading the gun and racking the slide, due to giving in to a “compulsion” to pull the trigger, putting a hole in the wall of the house the two shared with their cats.

“We bought the gun to stop the fascist government, but accidentally shot it inside the house.”

r/LiberalGunOwners is a goldmine pic.twitter.com/TCY7g6fdKY

— Reddit Lies (@reddit_lies) March 3, 2026

Now, thankfully, no residents of the house, either human or feline, were injured as a result of the gun being fired. After the incident where the bullet made a hole in a wall, the Reddit user insisted that the partner never load the gun with live rounds in the house and took custody of the pistol.

In the updates, the user reported the partner both started therapy for PTSD and took a long-overdue professional training course for the firearm and has since been to a range multiple times, stuff that should have happened long before that “accidental discharge” took place. All in all, this story is something those exercising their Second Amendment rights should view as a close call leading to someone becoming a responsible firearms owner.

But that is not how New York Times “Ethicist” Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosophy professor at New York University, saw it. In his column, a truncated version of the Reddit post omitting the updates about the training and range visits was used as the question, which led to an all-too-familiar predictable response.

“Alongside your partner’s worrisome compulsion, it would appear, is a perplexing belief system. How, exactly, does she believe that owning a handgun will help her or others in your community fend off the government’s actions?” Appiah wrote. “You say you want her to retain the security the gun provides, and yet her sense of security comes at a cost to her actual security.”

“States with higher household gun ownership have higher rates of fatal law-enforcement shootings, especially of people who were armed with guns,” Appiah continued. “Packing heat doesn’t protect you from state power; it increases your odds of being its victim.”

I can think of a lot of minutemen who could argue quite the opposite after April 19, 1775, for starters, and if you want to discuss being a victim of state violence, constitutional scholar Stephen Halbrook has described in multiple articles how British troops seized and destroyed firearms during the occupation of Boston after the Boston Tea Party and what happened as a result.

Appiah, though, doesn’t stop there, but makes the user’s partner the villain of the story for buying the Glock in the first place.

“At the very least, the question of whether there should be a gun in a home should be subject to deliberation and consent, not something one party imposes on the other,” Appiah wrote. “Your partner ought to provide you with a cogent explanation of why she wants a gun in the first place. The disquiet you feel is justified. Why should her sense of security be maintained at the expense of yours?”

Let’s be honest, the user and the partner made some major mistakes before, during and after the purchase of the Glock that could have led to a tragedy. They are lucky that only a wall was shot, and not a living, breathing occupant of the house.

At the very least, the user should have known that loading and practicing with live ammunition in the house was not in keeping with the rules of firearms safety – even without any experience with handguns – and should have conveyed that to the human in the house who’d purchased the Glock.

So, yeah, they deserve a bit of a lecture regarding the “accidental discharge” resulting from the “compulsion” to pull the trigger, but their actions did not warrant the lecture Appiah gave them.

“As with all questions answered in The New York Times’s ‘The Ethicist,’ our May 20 column was in response to an email sent directly to The New York Times, which we fact-checked with the submitter before publication,” a spokesperson from The New York Times told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Our advice columnist wasn’t taking a question from Reddit.”

This article has been updated with comment from The New York Times.