By Rich Bolas
Gabrielle Giffords suffered a horrible tragedy. She has my sympathy, and my prayers. But she and her husband are way off base in my opinion regarding gun laws.
Congressman Gifford’s issue would not have changed one iota if the gun laws she and her husband are lobbying for were to be enacted. The law that could have prevented Gifford’s shooting is already on the books.
It is illegal for a person with mental issues to possess a firearm. Gifford’s shooter had been banned from Pima Community College for behavior so erratic as to cause the administration and security forces to ban him. His parents and some of his friends noticed his behavior as being erratic.
None of these red flags were picked up by authorities, and this mentally disturbed individual carried out his plot. Again, tragic, but the law is already there that could have prevented it.
Mr. Kelly is very skilled at using statistics to support his arguments. He refers to the Washington D.C. gun registration as a model that Arizona should consider adopting, allegedly because it would prevent murders with guns.
He states that Arizona had 3,303 murdered by guns from 2001 through 2010 I do not know where Mr. Kelly gets his statistics, but I have to wonder how many of these were gang related?
Did you know that police shootings are included in gun death figures? But getting back to statistics, according to the FBI, in 2011 the registration program in Washington D.C. that Mr. Kelly cites did not work out so well.
Washington D.C. had that highest murder rate per capita in the United States in that year (12.46 persons murdered per 100,000 population). Conversely, we backward Arizonans had one of the lower rates in 2011 (3.53 per 100,000 population).
The last I heard there were over 35,000 gun-related laws in the U.S.
Let’s look at enforcing those that are there before we go on witch hunts that will not change anything.
Mike Druse
Sun City