Well, how about this, a column -- from a member of the editorial board of a major American newspaper -- that says gun control doesn't work!...
...If there are too many guns in Chicago, it's not because of any statutory oversight. The city has long outlawed the sale and possession of handguns. It also forbids assault weapons. If prohibition were the answer, no one would be asking the question.
The recent spate of killings gives a misleading impression. Since the peak years of the early 1990s, the number of murders in Chicago has fallen by more than half. In the first three months of this year, homicides were down by 1.1 percent. No one would describe the current murder rate as acceptable, but the city has made huge progress.
It has done so despite the alleged problem cited by Weis, which is the availability of guns, and particularly one type of gun. "There are just too many weapons here," he declared at a Sunday news conference. "Why in the world do we allow citizens to own assault rifles?"
Actually, in Chicago, "we" don't allow citizens to own assault rifles. Elsewhere, they are allowed for the same reason other firearms are permitted. The gun Weis villainized is a type of semiautomatic that has a fearsome military appearance but is functionally identical to many legal sporting arms....
...Gun control hasn't worked as a remedy for crime. So what makes anyone think the answer is more gun control?
Well done, Mr. Chapman, well done. Welcome to the Dark Side, my friend.
This is not to say that I think the media types are any more enlightened than the rest of us -- in fact, on some issues, such as gun control, I think they're considerably LESS so -- but the question needs to be asked, what does it say about the gun issue that a big-city mainstream media type such as Steve Chapman sees the "solutions" of Sarah Brady, Josh Sugarmann, etc. as the craven acts of political posturing that they are? He never really said as much, but I think it's safe to say that if Chapman didn't see it that way he wouldn't have written the column that he did. And in a town so infested with gun-haters as Chicago is? Talk about a watershed moment. I'd like to think so, anyway. Not that I think Springfield Armory and all the rest of the gun manufacturers in Illinois should stay put just because of this one editorial piece, but maybe if the idiot politicians pushing meaningless crap like bans on "assault weapons" -- that aren't even used in crime in the first place -- read it and re-thought their "solutions," then that wouldn't be a bad thing at all. But then that would require said politicians not to have an anti-freedom agenda in the first place.
|