LA Times Op-Ed Calls For Ban On All Guns Besides Hunting Rifles

In the least surprising news ever, a major U.S. newspaper is calling for a gun grab. Again. This time, an L.A. Times op-ed proposes banning private ownership of all guns except hunting rifles and shotguns. (The anti-gun:  lobby allows for a “hunting exception” to make their position look less extreme than it is. Surely they realize that guns used to kill elk and deer can also kill people.)

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The piece is loaded with the usual canards, including the one about how handguns only exist to kill people. Yes, but they’re the most efficient gun to carry for self-defense. (Several school shootings have been stopped by students or teachers with handguns, including shootings at high schools in Pearl, Mississippi, and Edinboro, Pennsylvania. We just didn’t hear much about them because the death toll was one or two, not dozens–thanks to the armed bystanders. But I digress.)

For example: Hunters could own shotguns (and rifles where state laws allow them for hunting), but they would have to be registered and the owners would have to pass a gun safety course before they could get a hunting license (already a requirement in most, if not all, places). That license would be a prerequisite for registering a hunting weapon. Resale of a weapon should be monitored to preclude passing it along to unqualified people. Ammunition sales would be tracked much like we do sales of pseudoephinedrine (an ingredient in meth).

As for handguns, assault-style weapons, etc., let’s have a flat-out ban. Beyond the histrionics of the gun lobby, there is no defensible reason for such weapons to be a part of our culture. They exist for one purpose: to kill. Yes, hobbyists also like to use guns for target shooting and other nonlethal purposes, but it’s hard to say that desire for sport outweighs the atrocious level of gun-related deaths in this country.

Of all the different activist groups out there, I’ve always found the anti-gun crowd to be the most fanatical but the least informed. For starters, this proposal would do nothing to reduce the “atrocious level of gun-related deaths.” Plenty of mass killers use rifles and shotguns to carry out their business. The teenage gunmen at Columbine High School used deer-hunting rifles in the midst of the Clinton-era “assault weapons” ban. Needless to say, they had no trouble at all getting guns into this “gun-free zone.” The entire school was disarmed, including teachers who were trained to properly use handguns in self-defense. Thirteen people were killed, and many more were shot but survived. That’s what the L.A. Times’ gun ban looks like in the real world.

Also see: 10 Awesome Pro-Gun Graphics

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