Let Us Reason Together

With all apologies to the prophet Isaiah, I used these words for this post because I feel that, looking at our "debate" on guns, there are too few times when reason actually plays into the discussion, which inevitably bogs down when some gun control opponent screams about the people who'd " better try to take my guuuns!" They also will talk about "my Second Amendment rights," but amazingly have an inability to actually quote what the Second Amendment even says. (If I were a betting man, I would have quite a few dollars betting that the phrase "well-regulated milita" won't come up in this attempt to quote the amendment that is surely being violated.) So, let's try to have an honst discussion about guns that doesn't involve the stoking of fears of some bogeyman to try to take away everyone's guns.

First of all, the last major attempt to regulate gun ownership in this country was a failed bid in 1999 to force gun manufacturers to install child safety locks on handguns. The last major gun regulation passed in this country was the assault weapons ban in 1994, which the Republican Congress allowed to lapse in 2004. Despite the claims by NRA enthusiasts that gun control does nothing to stop gun violence because "only criminals will have guns," the homicide rate, gun death rate, gun homicide rate and accidental gun death rate all declined every year from 1994 (The year the Brady Bill went into effect.) to 2000, with a slight uptick after 2001, the year that the Brady Bill was gutted by the Bush Administration. Despite claims that the five-day waiting period is unnecessary because of the effectiveness of the instant background checks favored by the NRA, these instant background checks failed to stop a mentally unstable college student with enough red flags to line several city streets. But, as soon as something happens, they insist that more guns would have made this tragedy much less tragic. I guess in their fantasy world, everyone is an expert marksman who only fires loaded weapons at the bad guys. An a message board, someone told me that this tragedy wouldn't have been avoided because "a knife could jsut as easily be used," but does anyone honestly think that 32 people would have been killed if it were a knife that was doing the damage?

Then again, this is what happens when people base their beliefs on ideology and work their way backwards to find reasons for their positions. Of course, they aren't entirely to blame, because they put their faith in the NRA, a source that I trust about as far as I could throw Rush Limbaugh with my left arm and Newt Gingrich with my right, at the same time. I say this because I heard from the fine people of the National Rifle Association during my run for the House of Delegates last year. Among several right-wing groups, I found at least one misleading question, but when I received the NRA questoinnaire, fully half the questions were either untrue or ridiculously vague in their intent. One of the most easily refuted falsehoods told by the NRA was that Maryland already had ballistic fingerprinting in 2002 when the DC sniper committed his crimes. If they would have just left at that, they would have simply used a misleading factoid, but they instead said that ballistic fingerprinting does not work and is an attempt to monitor gun owners. Never mind that the first hole in the logic is that if it is an attempt to monitor gun owners, it has to be effective in identifying which gun fired the weapon, but the Maryland ballistic fingerprinting file was only for handguns, not rifles, which the DC sniper used. In other words, when an obvious case can be made for extending ballistic fingerprinting because the record is incomplete, the NRA insists that, well, they have the records and they were useless. I called them on this horrible lie in my response, and needless to say, I got an F from the NRA. Which raises a question, if you are really correct on the issue, why do you have to lie in your arguments?

There is no one who is trying to take everyone's gun away. The Second Amendment uses the language "well regulated" while the First Amendment uses "no law" in explaining the treatment of how these amendments are to be treated in constitutional law. Responsible regulation of gun ownership has reduced crime and kept guns out of the hands of a lot of criminals. So, instead of using hysterics to try to make specious cases, let us reason together so that we can have gun laws that make America a safer place to live and one where law abiding citizens don't live in fear of those who are trying to ban all guns, when such people don't exist.