Let’s Take A Sensible Look At Gun Control

The Clinton era Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, I believe was a good step forward; however, the law expired during the Bush administration in 2004. As a nation, we have been going the other way, towards a return of the Wild West.

Let’s look at some of the steps backward,

• In April, Gov. Jan Brewer on Friday signed into law a bill allowing people to carry a concealed weapon without requiring a permit. (Huffington Post) (Which I do not believe has anything to do with what happened last Saturday.)
• In June, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Chicago’s ban on handguns. (Sun-Times)
  
• This month, “Carrying a gun on New Hampshire's House floor is OK for the first time in 40 years under new rules the Republican-dominated chamber adopted Wednesday.” (Boston Globe)

Now why in the world would you want the legislators to be able to carry a gun on the House floor? I would think that a gun-carrying legislator would inhibit open discussion. That it would intimidate the other legislators. When I went to Old Sturbridge Village just after New Years, they had a firearms exhibit where they had all types of firearms from the late 1700s to the early 1800s on display. They also had a plaque that proclaimed that all able bodied men had to report for militia training once a month on the town green and they had to supply their own musket and field pack.

The opponents of gun control cite the Second Amendment, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” However, when the Constitution was written, they were talking about guns that are on exhibit at Old Sturbridge Village. The guns of today could not be imagined in the wildest dreams of the founders of our country. For them a rapid-fire weapon was a gun that could be fire once in a minute, not a gun that can fire hundreds of round a minute.

Some facts about guns (The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence)…

• Gun death rates are 7 times higher in the states with the highest compared with the lowest household gun ownership. (Harvard School of Public Health, Harvard Harvard Injury Control Research Center, 2009).
• States with the highest levels of gun ownership have 114 percent higher firearm homicide rates and 60 percent higher homicide rates than states with the lowest gun ownership (Miller, Hemenway, and Azrael, 2007, pp. 659, 660).
• The risk of homicide is three times higher in homes with firearms (Kellermann, 1993, p. 1084).