No new gun control laws have been passed recently, but we
may finally be seeing the limits of the gun madness that has gripped the
country for the past few decades.
For a while now, every year has seen Republican state
legislatures pass laws that loosen gun controls and Republican judges strike
down existing gun control laws. Some of these new laws allow people new rights
to carry guns in public—on university campuses, in restaurants and in
employers’ parking lots. Other new laws give gun-toters new shooting rights,
for example, stand-your-ground laws, which give people the right to protect and defend their lives against
threats or perceived threats. These laws usually replace laws that require
individuals to retreat from danger.
Individuals have used these new laws to ostentatiously display guns and
use them at will.
This week,
however, saw what may be the beginning of a move to stem the slow but steady
erosion of societal control on gun violence that these new laws have
engendered.
In an important
case in Milwaukee, a jury is making a gun shop pay more than $5 million in
damages to two police officers severely wounded with a pistol purchased in the
store by what is called a straw buyer. A straw buyer is someone qualified to
buy a gun who purchases it for someone who isn’t qualified, in this case, for an
underage male who fired his illegally purchased firearm against police a few
weeks later.
Meanwhile, in
Auburn Hills, Michigan, police are charging a woman who shot at a fleeing
shoplifter posing no immediate danger to her or anyone else. The shoplifter
hadn’t even pilfered anything from the shooter. Police in Elkhart, Indiana said
they were considering filing charges against a man who did pretty much the same
thing. In both cases, the shooter had absolutely no
skin in the game. What was the motive then? I can only conclude that, like the
legendary Bernard Goetz who went hunting muggers on the New York City subway in
1984, these people were wishing and hoping for an opportunity to take their
guns out and shoot another human being.
The good news is
that these cases suggest that America is finally drawing a line in the sand as
to how much we are willing to endanger our population to accommodate the
National Rifle Association’s (NRA) incessant need to expand gun rights.
The bad news is
that we are drawing the line at a very dangerous place. We won’t allow
obviously false gun purchases, while still accepting the ease at which people
can purchase multiple guns, including military grade firearms, and as much ammo
as they want. There are still stand-your-ground laws that allow stone cold killers
like George Zimmerman to shoot freely whenever they say they feel threatened. Many
states still allow people to carry guns on college campuses and in restaurants
and other public places.
I would thus not
yet consider these three cases of constraining gun proliferation as a watershed
or turning point. Rather what we’re seeing are gun fanatics testing and finding
the limits of their new freedom. Tragically, their freedom, based on a flimsy
constitutional framework, endangers all of us and comes at the cost of tens of
thousands of gun deaths a year.
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