Response to gun violence must come from Congress
Santino William Legan had a problem.
He needed a rifle. A powerful one. He eyed a WASR-10, the Romanian version of the Russian AK-47. It would do the job.
But Legan lived in California, which bans such military-style rifles. So he drove to Nevada, which doesn’t. On July 9, in the town of Fallon, he bought the weapon.
Nine days later, Legan used it to shoot up the Garlic Festival in Gilroy, Calif, where he had graduated from high school. The weapon’s lethality allowed Legan to kill three people and wound 15 others in less than a minute, before police officers neutralized him and he shot himself.
Gilroy thus joined Parkland and so many other American cities as the scene of mass shootings. Gilroy’s story, however, especially shows why the response to this plague must come from Washington. For every state and city that gets tough on gun violence, others will enable it.
After the slaughter in El Paso and Dayton came the predictable comment from gun control opponents that new laws wouldn’t work. As evidence, they regularly cite Chicago, which has very restrictive firearms regulations. They inspired one of the two seminal Supreme Court rulings on the Second Amendment.
Following the 2017 killing of 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Tex., President Trump said, “If you look at the city with the strongest gun laws in our nation, it’s Chicago. And Chicago is a disaster. It’s a total disaster.”
Indeed, as the shooters in El Paso and Dayton carried out their attacks, someone shot up a park in Chicago. Seven people were wounded. It’s been another violent summer.
Not long before Trump’s comments, however, Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s office released a study showing that most of the guns used in crimes came from outside Chicago. Of all the guns police had confiscated, just 40 percent had been bought in Illinois. A chunk of those had come from gun shops just outside the city limits.
Roughly 20 percent of all the confiscated weapons were from Indiana. Chicago borders the state. The Giffords Law Center, which advocates for tougher restrictions, gave Indiana a grade of D-minus for its combination of lax gun laws and rate of gun deaths. Illinois got a B-plus.
The New York attorney general’s office conducted a similar study. It showed that three-fourths of all seized firearms came from outside the state.
New York City is close to a pair of states with strong laws, New Jersey and Connecticut. The study noted, however, that roughly half of those out-ofstate firearms came from six states with much weaker laws: Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia – and Florida.
The weapons go north on Interstate 95 in what the study called the Iron Pipeline. “Our analysis of the data,” the researchers wrote, “shows these states deserve their anecdotal nickname.” The study also noted that guns from Ohio — which has a D rating from the Giffords Center — is an “important but overlooked source of crime guns” to upstate New York via Interstate 90.
So only Congress can provide a nationwide, and thus effective response to gun violence. That will require almost every Republican and some Democrats to break with the National Rifle Association and the firearms industry’s usual attempts to deflect blame from easy access to militarystyle weapons and high-capacity magazines.
Example: U.S. Rep. Ted Yoho, a Republican from North Central Florida, told CNN, “Big Tech has a big responsibility in this,” by looking into people “that are posting manifestos out there.”
In fact, the El Paso shooter posted his white supremacist manifesto just 19 minutes before opening fire. His manifesto killed no one. His military-style rifle killed 22.
Similarly, Trump promised to root out violent postings on social media. But his administration didn’t sign a resolution toward that goal after the March slaying of 51 Muslims in New Zealand. When Trump hosted a social media summit last month, the topic was supposedly about anticonservative bias, not violence.
Combine easy access to firearms designed for maximum killing with rightwing domestic terrorism and you get what every credible expert and agency — including the FBI — considers a threat to national security. Without a proportionate national response, we are inviting the next slaughter.