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April 10, 2005

Sanity Prevailing?

The Strib notes that Congress, in the wake of the Red Lake massacre, has broken precedent and failed to try to scapegoat the law-abiding gun owner.

The day after the Red Lake shootings, the latest of three mass killings in Minnesota and Wisconsin in recent months, a group of House Democrats fired off a letter to Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., demanding a fresh look at new gun legislation.

But gun control was not on the agenda when Congress returned last week from spring break. Top Republicans are loath to do anything that could restrict gun rights, and Democratic leaders -- still smarting from recent election reverses -- aren't eager to advertise themselves as the antigun party either.

Why?

Some of the responses were, quite frankly, idiocy:

Gun-control advocates aren't ready to concede, arguing that next-generation safety locks and futuristic gun technologies that identify users by their hand grip could have made a difference, had the gun industry embraced them.

"The gun lobby has successfully fought advances in this technology," said Peter Hamm of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. "If they hadn't, we'd have the technology by now."

The Brady Campaign also took issue with incoming National Rifle Association (NRA) President Sandra Froman, who said the incident should prompt a discussion of new ways to keep children safe, including arming teachers.

Other respondents are, as they say, reality-based:
"Everything that kid did that day, practically from the moment he walked out of his bedroom, was a felony," said Joe Olson, a Hamline University law professor and president of the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance. "I don't think any gun-control laws would have made a difference."
Others, lacking anything else to turn to, resort to the left's old standards:
Cultural differences also have been cited to explain why Red Lake is unlikely to become a rallying cry for a new gun-control debate. Unlike the Columbine shootings near Littleton, Colo., a white, middle-class suburb of Denver, the Red Lake Indian Reservation is a desperately poor community that has found little resonance in the culture of politics and television outside of Minnesota.

"The fact of the matter is it's Native Americans, and they're not a powerful political constituency," said David Schultz, who teaches American politics at Hamline.

Ah. So it's politics...
Rep. Collin Peterson, a Democrat who represents the Red Lake area in Congress, said attempts to use the Red Lake shootings as fodder in the gun-control agenda probably would backfire on the reservation.
So votes are more important than principle to the gun-grabbing elements of the left?

Who'da thunk it?

Posted by Mitch at April 10, 2005 04:17 PM | TrackBack
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