Today's biggest story

Judging from the AP's coverage and other news sources such as network and cable news outlets, it's not hard to conclude that gun control has become a major news story. That's probably true unless you depend upon Wheeling "newspapers" for your news coverage. For instance, here's a later-updated AP report about the Democrats' actions from yesterday afternoon that could have easily made it into this morning's paper. (The AP has been constantly updating this filibuster story.) It didn't, however, and this lack of coverage on the Democrat's filibuster fits in nicely with their overall coverage of the larger issue of gun control in the aftermath of the Orlando shootings.

Here's a West Virginia angle

But this story has an important local angle: how WV's senators are reacting. From this morning's front-page story in the Charleston Gazette-Daily Mail, "Manchin joins gun filibuster":

“I can’t go back home this weekend and explain to the people of West Virginia why we haven’t moved forward on this,” Manchin said.

The article also mentions Senator Capito's previous votes on the issue:

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., voted with almost every other Republican against Feinstein’s legislation in December, but voted for Cornyn’s legislation.

(Note -- Feinstein's original legislation which she again proposed would allow the government to ban gun and explosives sales to people suspected of being a terrorist. Cornyn's NRA-backed legislation would require a delay and a judge's agreement with the action.)

Advice to Manchin: Don't worry about going home, Joe -- I doubt that West Virginians served by Ogden newspapers will even know about the issue.

The local's do editorialize, however

As I've noted on numerous occasions, this is a common practice for our local "newspapers"-- don't cover the original story but editorialize later.

Tuesday morning's editorial tells us, without any evidence, that limiting guns hasn't worked in other countries:

But in countries where limits on firearms ownership are quite rigid, much more so than anything suggested for the United States, evildoers still manage to get guns.

Really? It would have been nice to have seen just one piece of evidence that compares our gun deaths with any western democracy. Instead, the editorial argues for censoring the Internet telling us that:

The Chinese government does a good job of it.

As bad as their poor comparisons and lack of evidence were Tuesday, their attack on the president Monday afternoon, was worse.

On Sunday, the president gave a major address on the Orlando shooting which included the following:

Today marks the most deadly shooting in American history. The shooter was apparently armed with a handgun and a powerful assault rifle. This massacre is therefore a further reminder of how easy it is for someone to get their hands on a weapon that lets them shoot people in a school, or in a house of worship, or a movie theater, or in a nightclub. And we have to decide if that’s the kind of country we want to be. And to actively do nothing is a decision as well.

The editorial misconstrues Obama's arguments and then, as they frequently do, assigns motives to him:

For Obama to imply - as he did - that we need to determine whether "that's kind of country we want to be" betrays an ignorance of people in this country that is shocking, coming as it does from the man who claims to know the nation well enough to lead.

What Obama said probably was intended to further his social engineering agenda. Politicians at his level seldom say things without having an ulterior motive. In this case, he probably had new gun control laws in mind.

But implying that Americans concerned about basic freedoms, including the Second Amendment, somehow are the wrong "kind of country" is simply misguided - and wrong.

Sorry, that's not what the president said.

(Note -- no link to the editorial. For some reason, this editorial is not on their website. If you have a subscription, you can get to it by using the "all access newspaper replica edition" link at the bottom of their new web page.)