Buying Guns, or Voting - Which Should We Be Making More Difficult?

After the Virginia Tech massacre, the shooting in 2007, an investigation determined that the shooter had legally purchased a gun, and that he was not in any data base.  Even if he had not been able to legally purchase a gun from a licensed gun dealer where a background check was required, he would have been legally able to purchase a gun at a gun show without a background check.  There is NO prohibition that prevents or even discourages a person who is dangerously insane from purchasing a gun at a gun show.

In the United States, to be prohibited from exercising our rights requires a court decision.  A judge has to rule on removing our right to vote, or removing our right to own a gun.  The right has been very interested in restricting the rights of people to vote, actively acting to disenfranchise tens of thousands who are legally entitled to vote their single vote.  The right has been determined to make it as easy as possible for people to own guns, every possible kind of gun, unlimited guns.  They give lip service to preventing guns from falling into the hands of people who are legally prohibited from owning them, or who should be prohibited from owning guns, but they also do everything possible to make owning and carrying guns as unrestricted as possible. Guns can kill and wound people, innocent people.  In attempting to prevent people from voting the danger that Republicans are trying to prevent is merely the election of Democrats or other liberals - the LEGAL election of representative government candidates.

To put this in perspective, a recent article from article from Reuters reports that the United States has 90 guns per 100 people, more than any other nation in the world.  The next closest country in guns per capita is Yemen, at 61 per person.

U.S. citizens own 270 million of the world's 875 million known firearms, according to the Small Arms Survey 2007 by the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies.

About 4.5 million of the 8 million new guns manufactured worldwide each year are purchased in the United States, it said.

"There is roughly one firearm for every seven people worldwide. Without the United States, though, this drops to about one firearm per 10 people," it said.

After the Arizona shooting, sales of the kind of gun used for the massacre, the Glock (also owned by victim Giffords) 'surged' according to the this article, so these statistics are already obsolete, too low.

The Reuters article on the per capita study notes

"Civilian holdings of weapons worldwide are much larger than we previously believed," Krause said, attributing the increase largely to better research and more data on weapon distribution networks.
Only about 12 percent of civilian weapons are thought to be registered with authorities.

I have no objection to people owning firearms; I am not anti-gun.  But we have a lot of guns and not enough regulation for who owns them, when we have these kinds of shootings.  We have not done enough to keep people who misuse firearms from owning them.  Improvements were made after the Virginia Tech massacre, but not nearly enough improvement.  While the data base for restricting SOME sales to criminals or those who have dangerous mental health issues has risen to 1.1 million, there are an estimated 2 million names that are waiting to be added to that data base.  Arizona has only submitted 4,400 names, of the estimated 122,000 people who are legally prohibited from gun ownership, while at the same time Arizona is one of the most permissive states with no requirements whatsoever for concealed gun carrying.

Our ability to prevent guns from being in the hands of the wrong people has to become consistent with the quantity of guns we own in this country, a quantity we continue to expand at a rate unprecedented anywhere else in the world. 

Yesterday, I saw on conservative blogs lots of criticism of the Pima County sheriff for not having done more to stop the crazy man from shooting up Congresswoman Giffords and the other victims.  They went after the sheriff for having spoken out against the rabid political rhetoric that created a toxic political atmosphere, one which encouraged some people to act out violently.  We cannot claim that the only people to have done so are crazy; there were plenty of threats and acts of violent vandalism in Arizona, to which he referred.  The sheriff has no legal authority to do anything except enforce the law, and that law did not give him the right to do anything more than what he did.

At a time when conservatives are slashing rather than restoring our infrastructure, slashing rather than expanding the budgets for items like the government branch which maintains the NCIS database of people legally prohibited from gun ownership, and certainly having slashed the funding for mental health and the mentally ill, we need to re-evaluate what we are doing and on what we are willing to spend money.  It does not need to be endless politically-motivated witch hunts by Republicans like Darrell Issa.  It DOES need to be on essential infrastructure, including the NCIS data base maintenance.

We don't need to restrict the legal voting rights of any of our fellow Americans.  We do need to be restricting the gun ownership of those we have already determined to be legally barred from obtaining guns, including private sales and gun show sales.  We need to be using the laws we already have on the books more effectively.  We need to stop dangerous people from having and using guns, by closing the gun show loophole and by keeping our data base current.  It is a matter of priorities.