Aug 28^th

Yes I know, two days in a row on gun control can try your patience, but bear with me here. Last night, quite predictably, Bill O’Reilly began snorting about how the liberals would use the shooting of two journalists in Virginia to push for more of that unconstitutional gun control. He claimed that gun control didn’t work and cited Washington D.C. and Chicago as examples. These cities have strict gun control laws and still have very high murder rates. According to O’Reilly that demonstrates that gun control doesn’t work. Of course it doesn’t work if you have one set of restrictive gun laws for a city and much less restrictive gun laws for the state, or nearby state.

If you live in Chicago and want a gun just hop on some public transportation to Gary, Indiana, buy your gun, stick it in your coat pocket and head home. There will be no police stopping and searching people coming into Chicago; it’s easy. The same thing is true for Washington D.C., only more so; there you have just a few miles to get into Virginia where gun restrictions are among the most lax in the country. The killing of the two journalists on camera was in Virginia; the Virginia Tech massacre was in 2007 where the lax gun laws allowed the murder of 32 students and the wounding of 19 others.  Washington D.C.s strict gun laws existing next to Virginia’s lax ones are useless. O’Reilly’s examples of gun control not working persuade no one except those already persuaded not to look closely at the reasonableness of any of O’Reilly’s utterances.

National gun control does work. Australia had a substantial number of guns in the hands of civilians. Australians weren’t as much into gun hugging as Americans are but they did have an affectionate relationship with firearms.  In 1996 a mass killing occurred in Tasmania, an Island of the Australian coast, when Martin Bryant killed 35 people and wounded 70 others uses semi-automatic weapons. That caused the Australian government to ban all semi-automatic weapons. Individuals owning such weapons were compensated for the fair value of the guns they turned in. Six hundred and fifty thousand guns were removed. Many people were not happy and the Premier felt it necessary to wear a bullet proof vest when addressing some protesters. The result, however, was a drop of 57 percent in suicides and 43 percent in murders. (Non-gun suicides did not rise to compensate for the drop in gun suicides.) O’Reilly doesn’t talk much about the Australian experiment.

The killer of the two journalists in Virginia, we are told by Fox News anchors, had bought the gun he used quite legally and therefore, they claimed, nothing could be done. After all he did pass a background check; he was not under psychiatric care, so it was just one of those unfortunate things. Well, not really. If you want to kill some people and you live in Virginia (and in many other states) once you pass the background check, give or take ten minutes, you pay your money, pick up your gun and you’re off to slaughter whomever you please. (If you buy your gun from the guy down the street you don’t even need a background check.) I’ll bet a month-long waiting period to pick up the gun would help diffuse some hotheads. Unfortunately, the NRA probably wouldn’t approve of that.