The Daily Beast and New York Daily News aren’t known for reason and restraint, so perhaps it shoulnd’t comes as a surprise that they’re promoting the censorship of Instagram, a popular online photo-sharing social media service.

Brian Ries writing for the Daily Beast, launched into a rant yesterday because he discovered that like any other form of media, Instagram could be used to talk about firearms. Million sof Americans post pictures of firearms on Instagram,  and both FFLs (federally licensed gun dealers) and private sellers have adapted to using the service to post pictures of firearms they would like to sell.

This freedom caused Ries to completely freak out, and Ginger Adams Otis at the Daily News then jumped on the crazy train.

Neither hysterical story is legitimately “news.”

Mankind has been using the media technology of their time to advertising legal products for sale since long before Gutenberg created the printing press, and the Internet has been used to market firearms on message boards since the 1980s, well before the World Wide Web was even invented.

The only reason Ries and Otis are writing about the use of this technology is to attempt to manufacture outrage among their anti-gun peers, in hopes of pressuring Instagram to ban gun photos.

This isn’t directly a Second Amendment issue, but is instead an attempt by anti-gun members of the left-wing media to limit the methods by which Americans may share photographs and information about firearms with other Americans. This is an attempt to limit free speech and legal commerce, by those who would dictate what information you are allowed to see and share.

Remember when the media used to champion free speech?