I have been pondering a gun control post for awhile now and a recent news article has prompted me to go ahead and broach the subject. Combined with the fact that I am just about sick to death of talking about health care, this story really got me to thinking hard about responsible gun ownership in general.
This whole story raises many, many questions and is going to be used heavily by the anti-gun left (it already is). The point I want to make is that we can not take one isolated incident, sensationalize it and use it as an example of why firearms should be any more tightly controlled than they already are. The fact remains that this was a domestic violence issue. Simply because the woman who died was previously in the news toting a gun to a soccer game (within her legal rights in that state by the way) is no reason to point to her death as an example of how “crazy” handgun proponents are. Granted, wearing a gun on your hip to a kids soccer game my show a poor grasp of social norms, this does not make the woman crazy. The use of a legally owned handgun against another person in anything other than self-defense is still exceedingly rare, even in states with very loose gun control. I am not going to delve into the statistics in this post, for now please feel free to look at the link below. The data is from the Department of Justice and is not biased in any way for or against gun control.
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/guns.htm
I’ll dig a little deeper into the stats in my next post. For now, I should probably get back to work!
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