GUNS: Questions that need answers

Isn’t it curious how the Obama Administration, in office during the gun-walking operation known as “Fast and Furious” that facilitated the illegal smuggling of several thousand assault weapons into the hands of violent drug cartels in Mexico — weapons that have been implicated in the murders of possibly hundreds of Mexican nationals and a U.S. border agent, suddenly after several recent high profile shooting massacres now feels empowered to impose new restrictions on the millions of law-abiding American gun owners who had nothing at all to do with any of these things?

Shouldn’t the conversation about banning assault weapons and new gun control measures — this debate about restricting the freedom of millions of safe and responsible Americans in a huge way — start with the president lifting the Executive Privilege he asserted in order to conceal documents pertaining to the government’s gun-walking program? If we are going to talk about how these weapons fall into the hands of violent people, don’t the American citizens at least have a right to be fully informed about a government’s program that put assault weapons in the hands of violent people?

Should we not also be asking just how any new assault weapons ban could possibly prevent another mass shooting, when the previous Federal Assault Weapons Ban/Infringement (Public Safety and Recreational Firearms Use Protection Act of 1994, that expired in 2004) was still in full force at the time the Columbine High School massacre was perpetrated in 1999? That “reasonable and responsible” gun legislation completely failed to prevent Columbine; why expect anything different from new legislation?

Trick question here for anti-gunners: If the next tragedy involves a suicidal maniac who hijacks a school bus full of kids at knife point, then drives it off a bridge and kills 30 or 40 kids, should the government then ban knives, or ban school buses?

JIM BALLOU

Hayden