{"id":64583,"date":"2016-02-28T10:43:59","date_gmt":"2016-02-28T15:43:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=64583"},"modified":"2016-02-28T10:47:30","modified_gmt":"2016-02-28T15:47:30","slug":"the-washington-posts-blind-spot-on-gun-ownership","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=64583","title":{"rendered":"The Washington Post&#8217;s blind spot on gun ownership"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/opinions\/the-2016-gun-toll-7462-shootings-and-counting\/2016\/02\/26\/a1cbd864-dcd2-11e5-891a-4ed04f4213e8_story.html\">Washington Post<\/a>&#8216;s editorial board is back to advocating for gun confiscation in light of the shootings in Kalamazoo, Michigan and Kansas in the last two weeks. They can&#8217;t get it through their thick skulls that, at this point in our history, gun safety starts at the prosecutorial level and not at the legislative level;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>[T]he National Rifle Association demanded on Twitter that we tell them what law would have prevented the Kalamazoo shooting. The gun lobby cannot fall back on that lame argument in the Kansas case. If Mr. Ford\u2019s weapons had been confiscated when he was served with a protection order, or if he had been unable to obtain the assault rifle he toted around, he might have killed fewer people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>In other words, the Kansas shooter, who was a felon and was forbidden by current federal and state laws to possess a firearm should have had his weapons confiscated because of a protection order. I agree, but, who knew that he was already in possession of an illegally obtained weapon in order to confiscate the gun? His baby-momma bought the weapon and illegally gave it to him, after she had already attested to the fact that wasn&#8217;t her intention at the point of sale when she signed the federal document which asked her the question if that was her intention, and then she put her signature to the piece of paper. So that&#8217;s two gun control regulations which were broken before the shootings occurred.<\/p>\n<p>And, oh, by the way, he was served the order of protection at work. He didn&#8217;t have the weapons with him at the time because he left the job to get the weapons and returned to begin shooting. So how was the officer who served him supposed to confiscate a gun that wasn&#8217;t at the scene of the service, a gun that he shouldn&#8217;t have owned, by law, anyway?<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Yet focusing on individual cases misses the point. The point is not that one rule change \u2014 or even several \u2014 will stop every instance of gun violence; it is that we are a country saturated with firearms. When guns are so easily available to so many people under such loose restrictions, more people die. <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And there it is. It&#8217;s not that criminals are able to obtain firearms &#8211; there are laws in place to prevent that &#8211; it&#8217;s that so many Americans privately own firearms, that&#8217;s what has the Washington Post&#8217;s editorial board&#8217;s panties in a wad. The only people who claim that firearms are &#8220;easily available to many people&#8221; are people who have never purchased a firearm. if we&#8217;re so &#8220;saturated with firearms&#8221;, it&#8217;s wonder that the death toll from guns isn&#8217;t much, much higher, because the Washington Post&#8217;s editorial board thinks we&#8217;re all so irresponsible that we&#8217;re all out every day blasting away at anything that moves. The fact remains that there are millions of responsible gun owners who don&#8217;t kill anyone every day.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>What makes the United States different [from other countries] is the huge number of guns in circulation \u2014 nearly one firearm for every person in the country \u2014 along with a strong pro-gun lobby that prevents seemingly any popular, common-sense gun restriction from passing on the federal level, where such restrictions could have maximum effectiveness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>See, confiscation from every American gun owner is the only answer. Then we can be like Europe, where only criminals and terrorists have guns and citizens are defenseless.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to Chief Tango for the link.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The Washington Post&#8216;s editorial board is back to advocating for gun confiscation in light of the &hellip; <a title=\"The Washington Post&#8217;s blind spot on gun ownership\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=64583\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Washington Post&#8217;s blind spot on gun ownership<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40472,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-64583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-gun-grabbing-fascists"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=64583"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64583\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40472"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=64583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=64583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=64583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}