A crazed gunman kills 12 at a Washington Navy Yard. And though this is not the first episode of senseless violence President Obama has had to publicly address, on this issue we are still leaderless.
Gun violence, he said in a national address after the shooting, “ought to be a shock to all of us, as a nation and a people. It ought to obsess us. It ought to lead to some sort of transformation.â€
Indeed, “some sort of transformation.†But what kind?
The anti-gun crowd will assert that the number of violent tragedies we’ve confronted in recent years is reason enough to foist new laws — laws that, by definition, only law-abiding gun owners will follow — upon the public. But the truth is, while it may feel as though these events are becoming more prolific, violence nationwide is down.
Where gun violence is up in recent months, it’s in gun-free towns like Chicago and New York. And whether it’s the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Aurora, Colo. movie theater, the Washington Navy Yard or earlier, Virginia Tech, Fort Hood or Columbine High School, it’s clear that gun-free zones don’t prevent the mentally unstable from wreaking havoc on innocent victims.
In the case of Aaron Alexis, he bought a shotgun legally and then reportedly stole handguns inside the facility to perpetrate his crimes. The laws of the facility — and the District of Columbia — didn’t stop him.
Washington, D.C. Mayor Vincent Gray got it wrong when he was interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN after the shooting. When asked if a guy like Alexis could just cross the river into Virginia, where guns laws are more lax, and then bring a gun back into the district, he suggested that therein lies the problem.
“We are vulnerable to what goes on in the surrounding states,†Gray said. “That’s why we need national policies on this. Because it’s fine for the District of Columbia to do this, but if Virginia has a different set of policies or Maryland has a different set of policies, what good does it do us? These people will go right across the border and come right back into our jurisdiction.â€
He’s right, in that that’s what Alexis did. But by bringing his firearm into Washington, he broke an existing law. Again, criminals don’t follow local or state laws. What makes Gray think that a criminal — especially a mentally disturbed one like Alexis — would follow federal laws if he doesn’t respect local ones?
I’m brought back to my original point. We are leaderless on this issue. The President’s response to these shootings is to speak broadly about the need to curb gun violence, dispatch Vice President Joe Biden to say something folksy about shotguns, and then implore Congress and the states to figure the rest out.
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