WaPo Call for Handgun Ban

Since the topic is handled starting at Alphecca, then going to SayUncle, and lastly at Ravenwood's Universe, I'll leave them to the commentary. They are all correct.

I found SayUncles comments very close to what I thought when I first read the Op-Ed.

Via Jeff, comes this:

There‚’s an obvious thread here that members of Congress choose not to see: The all-too-free flow of handguns, a warped way of life that cows presidents and members of Congress who ought to recognize that the availability of handguns is murderous. The problem is that Americans own 65 million handguns and the only effective safety measure would be a ban on these made-for-murder weapons. As writer Jenny Price noted in a Dec. 25 op-ed in The Post, only 160 of the 12,000 guns used to kill people every year are employed in legitimate self-defense; guns in the home are used seven times more often for homicide than for self-defense.

Two fabrications in one paragraph. The number is more like 700,000. I think Ms. Price only thinks legitimate self-defense involves killing someone.

That is pretty clear to me.

But this is just astounding in it's missing the point of consensual government.

Lawmakers know all this and know as well that handguns -- however exalted they seem to be in America -- should not be in general circulation. Political long shot that it may be, a national ban on the general manufacture, sale and ownership of handguns ought be enacted. It would not pacify kids or adults with violent tendencies, and it might not curb general criminal activity markedly.

Could this brilliant editor miss the point the elected politicos are put in place to do what the citizens voted them in place to do. Politicians are not kings or mothers. Consensual government means they do what the majority wants not what they feel like on a whim. When they do, they tend not to make it back into politics.

Of course, the editor has to pull the "it's for the children" argument out, and then quote a politician to try and prove the correctness of the argument.

Such a bill was proposed more than a decade ago by Sen. John Chafee (R-R.I.), who has since died. "I hear people say it's a radical proposal," he said then. "Well, I think to have the current situation is radical. No other country has anything like it." He described slaughter by handguns as killing in record numbers, threatening education and pushing the high costs of education even higher. So what's new today?

Hmm. Just because it's not done this way in other countries, doesn't make it wrong. Our present governmental structure isn't emulated elsewhere, and it usually appears to work okay. And why is it the education is the topic and not the right to self-defense? People were allowed to defend themselves long before a school ever existed. The arguments are just so very anemic.