Cracking Down on Law-Abiding Gun Owners Won't Prevent Crimes

About Dave Workman:

Dave Workman is senior editor of TheGunMag.com and is the co-author of several books related to firearms rights. He is also a nationally recognized firearms authority and he writes a daily blog, Seattle Gun Rights Examiner.

Predictably in the aftermath of the theater attack in Aurora, Colo., gun prohibitionist organizations quickly moved to exploit the incident to push their political agenda.

However, an analysis of the facts as we now know them does not indicate a need for any new gun laws, but an acknowledgement that no statute or combination of laws is going to prevent a determined individual from committing mayhem. Even the authorities have admitted that.

The suspect in this case, James Egan Holmes, cleared federally required background checks when he purchased the four firearms recovered by police at the crime scene. He had no criminal record prior to this incident, and there is nothing to suggest he would have done anything like this. He is, or at least was, a brilliant student going into a highly-specialized field of medicine.

Considering some of the arguments put forth, it appears that the gun control lobby is bringing up a wish list. There have been calls to close the "gun show loophole" even though the suspect did not obtain any of his firearms at a gun show. People have been talking about background checks as if the suspect hadn't gone through one, when Holmes passed more than one.

[See Photos of the Colorado Movie Theater Shooting.]

Those who argue that a ban on so-called assault weapons might have prevented the Colorado carnage ignore the fact that the suspect was also armed with, and actually used, a 12-gauge pump shotgun and at least one of the two pistols he had. Over and above that, the booby traps found by police at his residence suggest that if he had wanted to, the suspect could have built an explosive device and killed and/or injured just as many people.

For whatever reason, many people believe that if we "just pass another law," this will provide some panacea to incidents like the Aurora shooting. There are laws against murder and aggravated assault, against bomb-making, and against discharging firearms in public, yet none of these statutes prevented this attack.

What this incident, and others that have occurred over the years, proves undeniably is that laws cracking down on law-abiding gun owners will not prevent such crimes. To suggest otherwise is both dishonest and delusional.

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Tags:

Colorado,

gun control and gun rights