Today, the amazing thing about the reaction to the Giffords shooting is that virtually all the discussion about how to prevent a recurrence has been focusing on improving the tone of our political discourse. That would certainly be great. But you do not hear much about the fact that Jared Loughner came to Giffords’s sweet gathering with a semiautomatic weapon that he was able to buy legally because the law restricting their sale expired in 2004 and Congress did not have the guts to face up to the National Rifle Association and extend it. (My emphasis)
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.
Even if you accept that we are all militia, as the Supreme Court of the United States has ruled, and we all have the right to bear arms according to the 2nd Amendment to the U. S. Constitution, what about regulation of automatic weapons? That in certain areas, there are no laws against the purchase of automatic weapons seems insane to me. What citizen needs an automatic weapon for self-protection? But our Congress stands immobilized by fear of the N.R.A. As Collins says:
Most politicians won’t talk about it because they’re afraid of the N.R.A., whose agenda is driven by the people who sell guns and want the right to sell as many as possible.
Doesn’t it seem like the least we can do?
