It's the Guns? Stupid? -

It's the Guns? Stupid? - Kathleen Kennedy Townsend lost in Maryland - a huge upset. Some pundits - including Glenn Reynolds - were shocked. Yet a letter to Instapundit puts it nicely (and I hope I can quote it...):

You voiced some wonder that Ehrlich won in MD despite his position on guns (or perhaps despite KKT's position on guns).

I would suggest that during the sniper episode more than a few otherwise liberal or liberal-minded people went to buy a gun and came up against the waiting period and the State Police background checks and the Federal forms answer truthfully on penalty of a felony) and rethought their positions on guns and gun control.(Hey, I'm a law-abiding guy/gal, why can't I have a gun to protect myself, and what if I need one during the waiting period? What if I made a mistake by accident on the forms and get in trouble? Hey, I vote for Connie Morella, therefore I am ok, right?) Maybe some cognitive dissonance set in....

A statistic that came out during the campaign was that thousands of guns were fingerprinted in the last two years (since the law was passed)and not a single crime has been solved on that basis. Meanwhile, the state archivist was found to have declared that MD would not be cooperating with other states' firearms background checks "for lack of resources", calling into question the commitment of the administration to doing something sensible about gun ownership by criminals with the existing laws. Further, I believe there was a brief period of time when even the background checks for Maryland gun purchasers were not done properly. When the sniper's weapon was found to have been brought in from out of state maybe some realized the futility of the exercise.

All of this makes it more than reasonable to assume that what we do about guns is a reasonable question, not an automatic "yes" to more gun laws.