Saturday, May 21, 2011

The real reason Joan Peterson obsesses over gun deaths

Brady Campaign board member Joan Peterson is frustrated that the average person doesn't obsess over "gun deaths" like her:

"These things fly under the radar of the average person."

Has she considered that there may be a good reason for that?  That is, accidental shootings are so incredibly rare in this country that they affect hardly anyone? 

I know from my training that accidental shootings always result from violating all three of the rules of gun safety.  It takes a great amount of disregard for human life to do so. 

Therefore what's on my radar is not the rare actions of the most negligent and criminalistic in our society, but the legislative agenda of gun ban advocates who want to use those rare events to restrict my rights. 

It is comforting that as gun sales and CCW permits continue to increase, with coincident decreases in "gun violence," that even fewer people will have guns on their radar.  The only real hope Joan Peterson has for new restrictive legislation would be new episodes of highly publicized mass shootings.  I hope she doesn't get what she wants. 

1 comment:

  1. Actually she does not have THAT hope either. The Heller and McDonald decisions from the Supreme Court have taken gun bans completely off the table, even bans of semi-automatic weapons.

    Gun grabbers are reduced to nibbling around the edges of the gun laws. Emphasis has shifted to two areas:

    1. Resist the normalization of guns in society by resisting tooth and nail any liberalizing of firearm carry laws in those places where they are not already liberal. Constitutional carry is especially distasteful to them, and may be politically unwise in the short term for pro-gun advocates. Do we not want to ensure that anyone who carries a gun in public is fully conversant with the rules of safe gun handling?

    2. Ammunition restrictions: if they can't ban guns, they're going to go after ammunition. This will fail, but some regulations may survive. Heller emphasized that a ban on functional firearms is unconstitutional, so ammunition bans are likely unconstitutional as well. But this has yet to be tested in a court case.

    The trends are looking good, but we must maintain vigilance, and hope that Obama does not get an opportunity to to replace one of the Heller 5 justices.

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