The Real Gun Guys

Chocolate City

An all together not unexpected editorial on the Heller ruling from a different perspective. An anti is an anti is an anti, or so it would seem, regardless of their background or social station.

Some excerpts:

It’s a ruling that’s bound to bring more bloodiness to Chocolate City.

Last week, by a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia’s three-decades-old ban on handgun ownership. Not surprisingly, National Rifle Association types, people who have long been oblivious to the body counts in urban America, hailed the decision as a victory for the Second Amendment guarantee of the right to bear arms.

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But just as the justices didn’t imagine that the Founders envisioned gun ownership as a right only for militias, I’m sure the Founders didn’t envision the crack cocaine trade. Or Uzis and Magnums. Or crime-ridden communities in which people wouldn’t have to defend themselves against foreign invaders or the forces of a president-turned-despot, but their fellow citizens

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Arthur Kellerman, a professor of emergency medicine and public health at Emory University, wrote in the Washington Post about how his studies had revealed that guns kept in homes were 12 times more likely to wind up injuring a member of the household than an intruder or another bad guy.

He also cited Justice Department statistics that show that far more guns are stolen by the bad guys to commit crimes than are used by the good guys to prevent them. In Atlanta, he said, a study of 197 home-invasion crimes revealed only three instances in which the inhabitants got to their guns before the intruders did.

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Last year, for example, I wrote about a single mother who, after being concerned about the rise in burglaries and homicides in her community, purchased a gun. What she didn’t count on, however, was that her young son was going to be more fixated with the gun than any would-be criminal.

She kept catching him trying to get to the gun. She continued to move it to places where she figured he couldn’t get it. But he finally did get to it — and fatally shot his younger sister while playing with it.

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Then there are the people who are living in such frightful conditions that they literally believe in shooting first and asking questions later. Many times, that means elderly people who’ll wind up shooting the neighbor who comes up on their front porch at night to hand them a piece of mail that wound up in the wrong box.

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I hate that the NRA’s narrow pursuit of preserving gun rights is making it nearly impossible for places like the District, which is plagued with urban violence, to take the steps necessary to stop gun violence.

And I worry that District officials and officials throughout the nation are going to have a tough time stemming the tide of illegal guns because of their single-minded focus.

Wow, so many anti-right talking points in such a short editorial. From the founders not envisioning modern weapons, to Arthur Kellerman’s flawed and discredited study, to holding up one irresponsible mother who left her gun out where her son could get to it and implying this is what will happen because of the ruling, to the old shooting the mailman canard, to the public health angle; this editorial is chock full of anti-rights chocolaty goodness.

I wonder if the author would react the same way if the ruling denied him/her the right to vote or the right of free speech.

After all, it’s for the children, and if it saves one life, right?

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