Gun Control

Evil people always find a way to kill It was bound to happen: Shortly after the massacre in Blacksburg, a hue and cry went up across the nation concerning gun laws and access to guns ("Va. tragedy likely to put gun control in spotlight," April 18). Such a national debate is seemingly sparked every time a sociopath kills innocent people with a firearm. It's our human nature to search for answers to explain a senseless tragedy. But the answer should not be legislation that would further abrogate our Second Amendment right to bear arms.

ORLANDO, Fla. -- Two years ago, Florida enacted a law that allows anyone who feels threatened anywhere to use deadly force. Today the National Rifle Association is shepherding similar laws through legislatures across the country. The so-called Castle Doctrine extended the notion of a man's home being his castle to public streets being his castle. When the law first went into effect, in October 2005, the nation's most prominent gun-control group, the Brady Campaign, decided to fight back.

WASHINGTON -- For five years, the National Rifle Association and its allies have successfully lobbied Congress to limit the ability of local police to access federal gun trace data. Now, by moving to remove those limits and increase the ability of local officers to track so-called crime guns, Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski is venturing into what is rapidly emerging as the latest battlefield in the war over gun rights. A provision first approved in 2003, when Republicans controlled Congress, sets tight controls on how the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives may share its gun data with local police departments.

WASHINGTON -- Only four months after impeachment apparently left Bill Clinton the lamest of lame ducks, the president stands alone in Washington as the only political leader with real star power and a track record of success that has been burnished by triumph abroad and legislative victories at home.He has prevailed in Kosovo, his most daunting foreign policy challenge; his gun control proposals have captured the public's support and thrown Congress into chaos; his brief campaign against Hollywood violence scored an early victory last week; and his seventh-year poll ratings exceed Ronald Reagan's and are on par with those of Dwight D. Eisenhower, the only other post-World War II presidents to serve two full terms.

Here is an excerpt of an editorial from the Boston Globe, which was published Tuesday.IN THE frustrating search for common ground on the issue of gun control, one fact commands attention: There is a gun sitting in nearly half of U.S. households with children.Although most everyone agrees that children should not have unsupervised access to guns, hundreds of children die each year in gun accidents alone.A coalition has been created which is devoted to preventing such tragic events by promoting education and personal responsibility among gun owners.

I HAVE NEVER owned a gun. I haven't fired a gun since I was a boy. Having a gun in my home would terrify me.I dislike guns, not just because of what they do to the people who get shot, but because of what they can do to the people who shoot them. At the same time, I have friends who own guns, and I can understand what motivates people to buy them. So, my views about guns and my emotions about people who own them are complicated.I've listened to my share of Second Amendment debates and, barring a new and insightful interpretation, I think the gun control folks have the better argument.

AS THE gun battles continue to rage in the schools, on the streets and in the fractious House of Representatives, something is missing.Amid all the emotional rancor, something has gotten lost in the controversy.In a bygone era, they used to call it horse sense. Today, in the absence of any sense whatsoever, all that's left is the artful dodge.Throughout the debate so far, reason has been trumped by strident hyperbole. But it need not be this way.It would be helpful to approach the issue of gun mortality from a more clinical perspective, taking a cue from the medical community, which deals with death and morbidity all the time.

WASHINGTON -- Desperately trying to restore order to the House, Republican leaders moved yesterday to slow the momentum of a Democratic gun-control drive and to paper over a spending dispute that has prompted rebellion in their own ranks.Speaker Dennis Hastert and his lieutenants announced the moves after a meeting in which Hastert warned his fractious Republican troops, who hold a narrow majority in the House, that they have no choice but to stand together. At stake, Hastert said, are not only their legislative goals but also their control of Congress if voters come to believe that the Republicans are unable to govern.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate began a legislative free-for-all on teen-age violence yesterday, taking advantage of the urgency created by the Colorado school shooting to promote personal and partisan agendas.Republicans unearthed a long-stalled measure that would allow the prosecution of youth offenders as adults, to which they hope to add amendments intended to curb the depiction of violence in movies, music and videos, increase safety in schools and stiffen enforcement of gun laws."We have to recognize our shortcomings and do what we possibly can to correct them," said Sen. Wayne Allard, a Colorado Republican who helped put together the GOP package.

In the fall of 1988, Maryland Attorney General J. Joseph Curran Jr. ventured into gun country in St. Mary's County with an unpopular message.Delivering a speech he would make countless times that fall, Curran tried to sell a mostly hostile audience on the state's ban on Saturday night special weapons, passed that year by the General Assembly but still needing ratification by the voters."

Obama's settlement stand won't help Following is a reader comment on Friday's Sun editorial posted on baltimoresun.com/secondopinion. Obama's stand on the settlements will bring him grief. The Israelis feel besieged by Arab numbers. The Arab fertility rate is higher, and some if not all of the Israelis believe one day soon they will be outnumbered and diminished to a minority status in their own lands. The settlements, in their minds, are one way to keep a toehold where the Arabs are multiplying.

Ten years ago this spring, two teenagers in Colorado gunned down fellow students and teachers in a killing spree that left 15 dead, 24 injured, and a nation horrified that such carnage could unfold at an American high school. In the decade since, there have been a million gun casualties in the United States. After the Columbine tragedy, I issued a report, "A Farewell to Arms," calling for the country finally to address gun violence head on. I recommended a number of measures: closing the gun show loophole, harnessing new technologies to make guns safer, allowing law enforcement to use body wires to catch straw purchasers, to name a few. I further proposed that while hunting and other recreational uses of firearms should remain unfettered, our long-term goal should be an end to unrestricted handgun ownership.

Gun enthusiasts feel a need to keep arguing for their right to bear as many firearms as possible when, as noted in this column recently, the battle is over, with the all-guns-at-all-costs crowd victorious. Their achievement is an estimated 280 million firearms in a nation of about 307 million people, a stunning ratio that guarantees continued gun violence well beyond the bloody spring we're having this year. That connection is what seems to set the enthusiasts off - that the all-guns-at-all-costs lobby is somehow responsible for all the American bloodshed.

Every so often I find myself stepping into the minefield that is public discussion of guns, gun violence, gun control and how these things relate to the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Because of misleading public statements by the president of the United States and his secretary of state, it's now time to do so again. President Barack Obama said on April 16 that 90 percent of Mexico's recovered crime guns came from the United States. The comment came during a joint press conference with Mexican President Felipe Calderon addressing the raging violence south of the border, as Mexican drug gangs battle each other and the government in gruesome fashion.

Don't be absurd," a reader of this column, E. Bruce Volensky of Alabama, wrote recently when I suggested in an e-mail exchange that he and other all-guns-at-all-costs advocates seem unfazed by the mass killings that have marked another American spring. "Those of us that support Second Amendment RIGHTS hate gun deaths, perhaps more than you, for it gives you what you seem to think is ammunition (no pun intended) for your cause." Thanks for the candor, Bruce. Those in the all-guns-at-all-costs crowd might cringe a little when they hear stories like the one out of Binghamton last month, or the one out of Columbine 10 years ago Monday, or the one out of Middletown (five dead, including three children, murder-suicide)

Americans have been killing each other for a long time - thousands upon thousands of men, women and children lying in the cold, cold ground from decades of homicidal violence, the bulk of it inflicted with guns. There are street killings here, bedroom killings there - single victims scattered across the daily news. (I saw my first victim 33 years ago this month, a woman shot to death by her estranged husband as she walked across a parking lot.) And then there are the mass killings, a squall of them this spring, with 57 dead within the last month or so, in a handful of incidents from California to New York.

Gun owners in Baltimore whose firearms are stolen would be required to report the theft to police under legislation approved by the City Council yesterday - despite questions about whether the proposal is legal. Supporters, including Mayor Sheila Dixon, say the bill will help police track stolen weapons used in crimes, but the city's law department has questioned whether Baltimore can legislate gun control, typically a state issue. In a June memo on the bill, the law department recommended the City Council hold off on advancing the measure until the Maryland attorney general issues an opinion on the bill - but that opinion is not finished.

Americans often buy guns for self-defense, a purpose that now has Supreme Court validation. But according to advocates of gun control, those purchasers overlook the people who pose the greatest threat: themselves. Anyone who acquires a firearm, we are told, is inviting a bloody death by suicide. So says Matthew Miller, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health. "If you bought a gun today, I could tell you the risk of suicide to you and your family members is going to be two- to tenfold higher over the next 20 years," he told The Washington Post.

The Supreme Court's decision in the District of Columbia v. Heller case settles a long, heated debate, finding the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own weapons for self-defense - not merely a right related to membership in a "well-regulated militia." But the ruling doesn't end the struggle over gun control, nor does it mean gun regulations have been eliminated. The court lists a number of laws the decision does not affect, including concealed-weapon prohibitions and "long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."

Thousands of citizens in Baltimore and other American cities have died in recent years in an epidemic of gun violence. The contagion is carried by a flood of weapons, legal and illegal, that presents a frustrating challenge to police, prosecutors and politicians attempting to calm the cities. Yesterday, the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court significantly complicated that effort to control violence with a 5-4 decision that struck down a Washington, D.C., law that bans private ownership of handguns in that city.