by Dish Staff
Last week, a nine-year-old firing an uzi accidentally shot and killed her instructor. Matt Valentine identifies pro-gun advocates critical of “putting a submachine gun in the hands of a slight nine year old” but he has “yet to hear any prominent gun rights advocates call for a change to the law—even to prohibit behavior they consider foolish and dangerous”:
To suggest a new regulation, no matter how reasonable, would be wholesale defection from the party line. The NRA tells us that gun laws are worse than useless. Criminals won’t obey them, so new laws “only punish lawful gun owners,” according to Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre.
Which regulations is he talking about? Take your pick—the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Affairs uses that language, “punishment for law-abiding gun owners,” to describe dozens of proposed state and federal laws, from background checks to magazine capacity restrictions to safe storage laws—even to laws banning the transfer of ammunition to people who aren’t authorized to have guns. The same rhetoric has been used by gun-friendly politicians and pundits for years. “Bad guys don’t follow the laws,” Sarah Palin said after the Aurora, Colorado, theater shooting. “Restricting more of America’s freedoms when it comes to self-defense isn’t the answer.”
That line of argument has always been a tautological black hole, but it seems an especially inadequate rationale for opposing a law prohibiting children from using fully automatic weapons.
Amy Davidson sighs:
The same political forces that gather around gun rights are those railing against government in any form, even the kind that involves keeping children and their gun instructors, or other teachers, safe. We are left not only with lax gun laws but shake-and-bake shooting ranges. This is part of the explanation for why talking to the gun lobby about “common-sense regulations” never seems to go well. They are drawing on, and stoking, a view that presumes the foolishness of regulations. It is sad and telling that the only department left to look into Vacca’s death is the state equivalent of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration—regularly derided by Republicans—and that it’s unlikely to be able to do much at all.
The Dish 