As I've stated regularly over the last few years -- as a hunter who owns guns -- I believe that carrying around a loaded firearm in public is simply insane.
That was demonstrated again last week, and tragically, when a two-year-old shot and killed his mother at a Wal-Mart in Idaho, with her own loaded pistol. She was carrying it in her handbag for who knows what reason, but she probably thought that somehow it made her and her family safer.
The truth is that a gun in the home is 22 times more likely to be used to injure or kill a family member than to stop an intruder. There's no statistic I'm aware of for gun use in Wal-Marts, but it's a safe bet that the numbers are about the same.
As if there wasn't already enough evidence to refute it, this is yet another instance that belies the National Rifle Association's narrative about guns. The mantra from the NRA is that we have enough gun laws; they just need to be enforced. And it contends that law-abiding citizens shouldn’t be restricted from doing pretty much anything involving guns, including owning an AK-47, carrying around a loaded weapon, or whatever.
Those arguments are unsupportable on their face. For one thing, there are an estimated 300 million guns in America. The idea that you can keep some of them out of the hands of criminals is outright ridiculous. And, of course, everyone is a law abiding citizen until they're not. The man who murdered 20 school children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School used guns legally acquired by his mother -- whom he killed with one of her own weapons. She was a law-abiding citizen until she was dead.
As we move around our neighborhoods in Wisconsin or really anywhere in America these days, we have no idea who might be carrying a loaded weapon. I have no confidence that anyone who is paranoid enough to believe that doing so actually makes them safer would have the prudence and judgment to use that weapon in the extremely rare case where some threat actually exists. It's much more likely that a loaded gun in a crowded store will be used to the kind of tragic end that occurred in Idaho.
I know it won't happen any time soon, but let's start a movement to repeal these dangerous laws allowing people to carry concealed weapons.
