Improve our gun laws? But this is America!
Daniel Hernandez and Randy Friese are at it again, pushing their “unAmerican” idea — this notion that we might be able to save a few lives by tightening a few gun laws.
The two men, now Tucson legislators, tried to minimize the carnage seven years ago, when a sick gunman opened fire in a Safeway parking lot, killing six and injuring 13 others, including then-U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.
Now they’re trying again, as they do every year — proposing reforms to Arizona’s gun laws.
Only don’t look for the Legislature to spend even 10 minutes listening to their proposals. The two legislators will be marginalized and minimized for two reasons:
1. They’re Democrats, and this Legislature rarely, if ever, considers the merits of anything coming from the minority party.
2. What they’re proposing is sacrilege in gun circles, which makes it sacrilege in Republican circles.
Remember, this is a Legislature that should have immediately moved to ban high-capacity magazines such as the one used by Jared Loughner to transform that Safeway parking lot into a killing field. Instead, our leaders designated an official state firearm that year.
Republic reporter Dustin Gardiner, in his excellent piece Wednesday, was charitable when he wrote that Friese and Hernandez are “unlikely to succeed” in their efforts this year to try to do something to keep guns out of the hands of those who should not have them.
They have zero chance.
The chance of a killer bomb cyclone hitting this week’s Barrett-Jackson car auction is bigger than the chance that our leaders will consider whether there is common ground that might minimize what is far too often bloodsoaked ground.
The chance that Gov. Doug Ducey will announce a major new funding source for public schools is bigger than the chance that this Legislature will hold so much as a single hearing on a proposal to tighten so much as a single gun law.
Our leaders won’t consider House Bill 2024, requiring anyone who wants to buy a gun to undergo a federal background check.
They won’t consider HB 2140, allowing family members or police officers to petition a judge to bar someone with mental-health issues from possessing a gun.
They won’t consider HB 2299, requiring anyone convicted of a domestic-violence offense to turn their guns over to police while they’re on probation.
And they certainly won’t consider HB 2023, banning the sale of bump
stocks, those devices that transform a semiautomatic rifle into what amounts to a machine gun.
Charles Heller, spokesman for the Arizona Citizens Defense League, told Gardiner it’s “un-American” even to ask why people need a device that allows a shooter to pump out up to 800 rounds a minute.
“It’s an un-American question: ‘Why do you need it?’ ” he told Gardiner. “Why do you need a Corvette when you could have a Hyundai?”
Perhaps he could pose that question to the families of the 58 people killed in Las Vegas during the October massacre, or the more than 500 people who were injured in that deadliest shooting in modern American history. Maybe he can explain how it’s unpatriotic to question how Stephen Paddock was able to convert his hotel room into what amounted to a machine-gun nest overlooking an outdoor music festival.
Predictably, Heller — like others in the gun lobby who see any proposal as an all-out attack on the Second Amendment — calls Hernandez’s and Friese’s bills “feel-good measures” that won’t improve public safety. Bad guys, they say, will always get guns.
And, tragically, they’re right about that.
I just didn’t know it would be unAmerican to try to at least stop a few of them.