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Sniper gun control { October 22 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-vpren222973941oct22,0,5341798.columnhttp://www.newsday.com/news/columnists/ny-vpren222973941oct22,0,5341798.column
Sniper Won't Stop Gun Control Foes
Robert Reno
October 22, 2002
The gun-owning classes run the gamut of respectability from honest hunters to the drooling maniac - or maniacs - now terrorizing the District of Columbia and two adjoining states.
Without hunters, deer populations of many states would reach levels where it would no longer be safe to take a peaceful Sunday drive.
On the other hand, the nation's tolerance for gun ownership is being tested as rarely in its history by the activities of whoever it is who has made people in the nation's capital, Maryland and Virginia fearful for their lives.
When even football games are being canceled, people who like to think they play America's most bone-crushing sport are revealed as trembling ninnies.
The obvious question is: What fresh outrage and what sort of body count would it take for voters to conclude that at some point the constitutional right to "bear" arms must be abridged in new and more imaginative ways?
I suppose people like Charlton Heston would argue that even if the sniper had exterminated 10 times as many victims it would still be insufficient reason to restrict gun ownership. It surely would not make a dent in his suicidal pledge to never surrender his guns until they are pried, in his words, "from [his] cold, dead hands."
There has even been a lot of unhelpful speculation that the sniper is a member of al-Qaida or is at least "olive skinned." This way he can be smeared by the suggestion that he is Arab, even if it also implicates a lot of similarly complexioned and similarly innocent members of other groups.
Anyway, America's tolerance for gun violence doesn't seem to have been severely tested even by the sniper. This is at curious variance with experience in other civilized nations. When, in 1996, 16 children and a teacher were shot dead with a pistol in Dunblane, Scotland, the parliament of the United Kingdom reacted by virtually banning handguns throughout Britain. In Australia, there was a similar political reaction in the same year, when a maniac shot and killed 35 people in Tasmania. Since then, the Australian government has purchased over a half-million privately owned guns and destroyed them.
Why do Americans alone resist gun control when it endures higher murder and gun violence rates than most nations? The answer is facile in its simplicity. It's because the National Rifle Association has made it its business to become the most efficient and vindictive lobbying organization in America. The NRA need only lunge menacingly at a congressional candidate to get him to back off an anti-gun position.
Yet even this doesn't explain why more grown people don't make the connection between the number of guns in America and its disposition to violence.
Heston's contention that gun ownership is a constitutionally given right becomes fatuous in the light of repeated U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have upheld gun statutes that are a thicket of restrictions varying widely from state to state. I guess White House spokesman Ari Fleischer best summed up why Americans tolerate such elevated levels of gun violence when he asked last Tuesday, with appalling fatalism: "How many laws can we really have to stop crime, if people are determined ... to violate them?"
Copyright © 2002, Newsday, Inc.
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