Monday, January 10, 2011

Ban the Glocks

This kind of an op-ed piece took longer than I expected to appear:

If Loughner had gone to the Safeway carrying a regular pistol, the kind most Americans think of when they think of the right to bear arms, Giffords would probably still have been shot and we would still be having that conversation about whether it was a sane idea to put her Congressional district in the cross hairs of a rifle on the Internet.

But we might not have lost a federal judge, a 76-year-old church volunteer, two elderly women, Giffords’s 30-year-old constituent services director and a 9-year-old girl who had recently been elected to the student council at her school and went to the event because she wanted to see how democracy worked.

Loughner’s gun, a 9-millimeter Glock, is extremely easy to fire over and over, and it can carry a 30-bullet clip. It is “not suited for hunting or personal protection,” said Paul Helmke, the president of the Brady Campaign. “What it’s good for is killing and injuring a lot of people quickly.”

Yes, the events in Tuscon are a tragedy of irreducible proportions for those who lost a loved one.  But the reaction cannot be "let's ban all Glocks."  First, I am not sure if we know that Loughner got the Glock legally or illegally.  Whose to say that if the Glock was a banned weapon that he wouldn't have been able to obtain one anyway.

You know what surprises me?  That someone else didn't shoot Loughner to stop him.  If Arizona is so "gun crazy" why didn't that happen?

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