Mass killings in the United States haven’t reached the point where we’ve become desensitized to tragic loss of life, but it seems that efforts to place any controls on firearms sales, or even the size of magazines that feed them, are bound to fail.
President Obama’s campaign after the slaughter of grade school kids in Newtown, Conn., went nowhere in the Senate. In Colorado, two legislators were recalled, with their sin being they were portrayed as anti-gun. The Navy yard killings passed with hardly a whimper in Washington about making guns less available.
Apparently that is as it will be for the foreseeable future.
Americans are keen on freedom, and many envision any effort to place anything that smacks of gun control on the books as an affront to their Second Amendment rights. Rationale is that the least controls eventually will lead to confiscation of all weapons, right down to Junior’s B-B gun.
That’s pretty far-fetched, but, as it always seems to be, perspective has a much stronger presence than reality.
The culture that has made guns so much of an issue may be traced to long ago, when the West was being settled, first by fur trappers and traders and then pioneers who fanned out in wagon trains stretching from one horizon to the other.
Hunting and ownership of guns to accomplish it, from rabbits and squirrels to large mammals, is considered a birthright by many — there’s not a thing wrong with that.
The unfortunate outcome is that firearm technology has outstripped necessity, and many good, honest, well-meaning folks are so fascinated that they want to own what’s on the cutting edge. That includes a good many weapons designed only for human killing fields — wartime scenarios.
The second phase of that is that those who stand to gain the most, the manufacturers, have their tentacles intertwined throughout the nation and traffic in misinformation about what even modest controls might do to curb horrible events such as the recent massacres.
Will that change? Maybe not, but that shouldn’t preclude efforts to make people safer.
— Bob Johnson
Gun control efforts slip by the wayside
