It is no secret that I am in favor of more handgun regulation. It is not that I hate guns, it is that I see the caviler attitude to this dangerous tool and that is unacceptable when we are going to allow almost any citizen to purchase them. Hand guns have a single purpose, to harm other humans. For all that staunch gun advocates will tell you that one could hunt with them; we all know that is just BS.
Still if people feel the need to carry such a tool, well, that is their choice. Personally I couldn’t deal with living in that kind of fear, but each to his own. The issue is always going to be over what is the appropriate level of regulation.
For me regulation is all about safety. The Supreme Court has found that gun ownership, especially handgun ownership is an individual right and we are going to have to live with that for quite a while. Given that it is incumbent on all of us to develop sensible regulation based on safety.
The problem is that many, not all by any means, gun-rights advocates are not willing to bend on the issue at all. They want a totally unfettered ability to carry any gun they want anywhere they want. Which leads us to situations like the one that is unfolding in Arizona.
A staunch gun-rights advocate in the State Senate, Republican Senator Lori Klein recently whipped out her raspberry red .380 hand gun, with a laser sight and no safety and pointed it straight at the chest of a reporter from the Arizona Republic she was talking to about gun rights. It seems that her intent was not to menace the reporter but to just show off the weapon.
Reportedly Sen. Klein said that this was okay as “She did not have her fingers on the trigger”. As anyone who has ever been to any kind of gun safety class knows this breaks several rules. You never assume that a gun won’t fire; you never, ever, point a weapon at something you don’t intended to shoot.
The issue here is not one moronic State Senator, but rather what the cult of gun ownership and non-regulation leads to. Arizona is one of only two states to have a State Gun, and it is one of many states that has removed mandatory safety training for handgun owners. Sen. Klein has said that she has had ‘informal gun safety training” mainly from her father. This is where the real problem comes.
You can learn a lot of things from your parents, but if they are not skilled at the task they are teaching you then you are not going to be very skilled at it either. I don’t know if Sen. Klein’s father was good or bad at gun safety, but I do know that his daughter did not absorb the lessons and might have taken them more seriously if someone not of her family was giving them.
Think about the mind set of someone who not only would bring their weapon into the chambers of the Arizona Senate, but in talking to a reporter would just pull the weapon out and start showing off how easy it is to aim by putting the laser sight on their chest.
This is clearly someone that does not respect the danger that a handgun represents to everyone and everything in front of it. That she would carry it around with the safety off is terrifying to me. What happens when she reaches by it and snags the trigger on a sleeve? That sounds like a good way to shoot yourself or another.
Then there is the issue of it being raspberry red. Guns are not accessories for your wardrobe. That we are in a place where it is a marketing choice to manufacture guns that are “cute” or “fashionable” shows how truly far we are from being sensible about guns.
Again, if you are so fearful that you have to carry a weapon to feel like you can function safely, well I feel sad for you, but that is your call. Maybe you are under that kind of threat. You probably are not, but if you are then I don’t have a problem with arming yourself. However, if you are buying a gun because of the color of the body and grip, then it is not about protection anymore, it is about fashion and that is problem.
I am sure there will be some folks who want to discount this as a one off. To say that it is not the fault of gun advocates that one jackass of a State Senator does not know how to handle a weapon. I can’t go along with that.
This is the end result of not regulating handgun ownership closely enough. Someone with a real appreciation for what a gun can do and how to handle it is not going to half as dangerous as Lori Klein who seems to think that there is not any appreciable risk to a loaded weapon as long as she doesn’t have her finger on the trigger.
There are far, far too many Lori Klein’s in the world and the gun lobby through the NRA and others is pushing not to make them more informed and safer but exactly the opposite. Any time sensible regulation is brought up it is implacably refused by the 2nd Amendment advocates as an infringement on their Constitutional rights.
This whole story could have gone a different way. If Sen. Klein had the proper training and respect for her weapon, she still could have brought it out, unloaded it, checked the chamber and had the slide back to show an open breach, then shown the reporter the laser site feature by aiming the empty weapon at a wall or a chair or some such. This is what it looks like when someone knows what they are doing with a gun.
That would have been a win for gun advocacy, not the continuing black eye that 2nd Amendment advocates have to contend with. From the point of view of those who want tighter regulation of weapons, this is not an isolated incident; this is how large numbers of children and adults are accidentally shot every year.
Which brings us back to the point of all of this; what is the sensible level of gun regulation. It seems to me that we can all agree there is a need for some kind of regulation, we don’t want things to degenerate into a Tombstone without Wyatt Earp.
The way to avoid this is to have mandatory and on-going gun safety training. If you want to be armed, that is going to be your call, but we should not have the rights of one citizen to be safe damaged by another. No one should be able to own a weapon they can not handle safely. The only way to assure the rights of everyone is for those who choose to be armed to also be required to demonstrate that they can and do handle weapons safely.
As for Sen. Klein, well it does not seem that she broke any laws. She did not intend to menace the reporter, she merely wanted to show of what to her was a fun toy. We don’t criminalize attitudes, so she is not a criminal, but she is criminally stupid and could have accidentally ended the life of a reporter. For that she should really reconsider if she has the sense required for safe gun ownership.
The floor is yours.