NYT: Seizing Guns Is Not About Gun Rights!

I didn't blog about Sarah Palin's Bus Tour or her comments regarding Paul Revere. I don't find stories like that particularly interesting. For starters, national politicians, who have a microphone in front of their mouths for hours a day, are bound to make a mistake every once in awhile. I don't care if in the 2008 campaign Obama said he had been to 57 states or that McCain called the Czech Republic, Czechoslovakia. They misspoke. It happens.

Similarly, if in extemporaneous remarks, Palin got the details of Revere's ride wrong, I'd be able to sleep at night. Furthermore, I don't trust the mainstream media to get the particulars correct, or treat Palin fairly, so I didn't bother to follow their version of events.

Preamble aside, this week I came across an astonishing reference to the controversy in the New York Times. Its executive editor, Bill Keller, wrote a piece about Palin's relationship with the press, which contained this passage:

At the core of the media antipathy, though, is something more fundamental. The fact is, reporters want as badly as anyone else to see the country led by someone who inspires confidence. But watching Palin answer a question is like watching a runaway train struggling to stay on the rails, and fact-checking her is like fishing with dynamite. When she is caught getting something wrong — most recently turning Paul Revere’s ride into a gun rights crusade — she tends to dig in deeper. (Her attitude that the truth is what she says it is appears to be contagious. In the case of the midnight ride, Palin fans tried to rewrite history on Wikipedia to conform to her version.) I think a lot of journalists, regardless of their politics, find her confounding and a little frightening. 

The link Keller provides is dead, so I don't know what point he's trying to make or what, specifically, he's claiming Palin got wrong. I don't know what sort of conventional wisdom about the error Palin made has become embedded in left-leaning circles. If I did, I might understand his remark. However, a crucial point must be made: Paul Revere's ride most certainly involved gun rights. The British were marching to seize the colonists' weapons. Again, forget what Palin did or didn't say. Forget about the changes made to Wikipedia. Here is what the Encyclopedia Britannica has to say (emphasis added):

Battles of Lexington and Concord, (April 19, 1775), initial skirmishes between British regulars and American provincials, marking the beginning of the American Revolution. Acting on orders from London to suppress the rebellious colonists, General Thomas Gage, recently appointed royal governor of Massachusetts, ordered his troops to seize the colonists’ military stores at Concord. En route from Boston, the British force of 700 men was met on Lexington Green by 77 local minutemen and others who had been forewarned of the raid by the colonists’ efficient lines of communication, including the ride of Paul Revere.

I simply can not believe Keller would claim that Revere's ride did not involve the right to bear arms. What does he think it was about? Abortion rights, same-sex marriage and affirmative action?

There are legitimate reasons to criticize Palin. Why must her critics always overreach? Or, is Keller fearful of any justification for the Second Amendment?