Gun Nuts

WARNING: This post is going to be pretty blunt. It may offend some.

Regular readers will know me as a consistent moderate on issues of gun control.  I support Federal standardized gun ownership (rather than state-by-state) laws, elimination of high-capacity magazines, closing gun show loopholes, and a variety of other measures that won't prevent gun ownership and use, but which may help to ultimately save lives.

But this from Capitol Hill just pisses me off. So, if you're an anti-gun extremists who thinks all guns are bad, you should probably just browse on to somewhere else on the interwebs.

Assault weapons didn't kill innocent children in Newtown, or theater partons in Aurora, or students in Blacksburg, or seriously wound a Congresswoman in Tucson. A mentally unstable person with a wealth of judgement issues did. No trigger design I'm aware of pulls itself.

This line of thinking strikes me as one thing and one thing only -- reactionary politicians who pander to the anti-gun crowd who thinks anything using gunpowder is evil. "All assault weapons should be banned..." a common statement bandied about lately. Usually by people who've never fired a gun, let alone knowing a bolt from a bandolier.

Assuming I'm someone intent on doing harm, how does this affect me? If I'm even halfway knowledgeable I know that an off-the-shelf bolt-action rifle, like a Remington 700, is far more accurate than all but the most heavily tuned AR-type rifles. A big 20x scope, a hard-hitting flat trajectory round like a .308 Winchester, and a place to hide make you a lethal weapon capable of inflicting incredible damage. And the good news? It's not an "assault weapon" by category. Sweet. Even with this ban, you're still in business.

To go to the complete extreme -- two-thirds of the firearm inflicted deaths in the United States in 2010 were suicides. FAR more lives than all the mass shootings combined. Are we trying to legislate that? No, of course not, since it doesn't get our politicians on TV. And my hat's off to you if you can figure out how to off yourself with an AR. Grandpa's .38 special snub nose is a far better choice.
 - and still legal under the proposed bans.

But we can't put this legislation into the hands of those who DO know that an AR is no more or less lethal than your average deer rifle. They feel compelled to go to the "Ted Nugent extremist, a machine gun in every home, don't you touch my guns" position on complete auto-pilot. As an aside, I love Uncle Ted for many reasons, but he has some seriously off-kilter views.

Legislating semi-automatic firearms won't save a single life. If someone is determined to do harm, they'll find a way. Witness the knife attack in a Chinese school (around the same time as Newtown). Or you drive your car onto a crowded playground or park. Hell, one web site claims more people were killed with hammers than all firearms combined last year. I don't see any movement to ban the ball-peen hammer category...

So, my few simple suggestions:

• Take that money that the NRA proposes we use for armed guards (and what the heck, half of their lobbying budget) and put it into our overstressed mental health system. One clear thing has emerged in all of these shootings - the perpetrators were NOT well.
• Increase penalties for commission of crimes with a firearm. You commit a crime using a gun -- jackpot! You get an automatic decade in jail. You kill someone during that crime? Hello, Death Row. When the stakes are higher, suddenly it changes the whole game.
• Institute a modest tax on firearm purchases that funds local law enforcement, as well as mental health. Don't tax ammo - it's proven that most criminals don't shoot many rounds. An ammo tax just hurts the legitimate gun owners. While we're at it, lets tax cigarettes and use that to pay for Obamacare.
• Hold gun owners responsible for crimes committed with their firearms. If the mother in Newtown knew she was on the hook for having lethal weapons accessible to her violence-prone son, maybe she'd have more carefully considered her options. Though in the end, perhaps you could argue that she got what she deserved. Being killed with your own gun has to be pretty clarifying.

Drastic measures? Certainly. But we're clearly in a drastic situation. These incidents seem to be becoming more frequent and more lethal. Something has to give, but the simplistic banning of semi-automatic firearms won't get it done.

Again, all just one guy's opinion.

-Sean-