Boise’s alternative weekly, the Boise Weekly, has an editorial today decrying the lack of gun controls in the state, especially as it applies to the mentally ill, public space, private transfers… well, in short, just about all aspects of current Idaho gun laws. Try this out for a taste
A few months after Jason Hamilton killed his wife and then took two military rifles from his ample collection and opened fire on the Latah County Courthouse, killing a cop, a church caretaker and then himself, Moscow Mayor Nancy Chaney floated the idea of a gun ban.
It would have only applied to city property and it was not a direct reaction to the shooting, Chaney said. The city never actually passed anything, after the Idaho attorney general suggested that cities and counties were not authorized to regulate guns.
Chaney’s idea was pilloried by Idaho’s ubiquitous and bombastic gun set.
The case he’s talking about happened in May of last year. Joe Huffman posted about it at the time, and you can Google for more stories if you like. Note the “not a direct reaction to the shooting”… you might sell that line to the average Weekly reader, but for the rest of us, does the term “that dog don’t hunt” mean anything to you or the Mayor? The idea should rightly be pilloried because it was an emotional and unconstitutional reaction to something that was already a crime! For the Weekly, this case is the jumpoff point for an editorial that tries to paint Idaho as some sort of crazy wild west, brands gun owners as “bombastic”, and suggests that the politicians and gun dealers and police in the state have some sort of under the table, wink-wink deal going whereby any old run of the mill nutbag can get a gun in Idaho and the aforementioned watchdogs promise to smile and look the other way, {shrug} “what else can we do?…”
But state police and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms found that all of Hamilton’s gun purchases were legal.
“There was not an illegal purchase with any of the guns in his possession,” said Idaho State Police Lt. Charlie Spencer.
That means that no gun dealer did anything wrong in selling Hamilton his guns. But police have no idea where he got some of the guns and no record of sales on others. It is legal in Idaho to buy a gun with cash from, say, the back of a pickup truck at a construction site in Nampa.
Careful there Mr Hoffman, the BATFE doesn’t take kindly to people questioning their competence. Just sayin’, you know? And really, there is no reason for it to be illegal to buy a gun for cash from a private party regardless of where the pickup truck is parked. (You mentioned Nampa… what are you implying there, eh? Do you have some kind of problem with the folks who live in Nampa?)
But throughout the whole editorial, the major point that seems to be lost is that another law on the books WON’T SOLVE ANYTHING! Seriously. It was already against the law for the Moscow shooter to take a gun into the courthouse and shoot people. It was already against the law for the Virginia Tech shooter to take a weapon into the school and shoot people. It was already illegal for the Boise shooter to shoot the three students from Lineman College, and it was already illegal for the 18 year old kid to shoot up the house and car in Canyon County this morning. Does anyone really believe that another law on the books would stop any of this?
A group that includes the State Police, the Department of Health and Welfare, the courts and the Attorney General’s office has met a few times to devise a method for forwarding mental-health cases to the background check database. But Health and Welfare said it was up to the courts, and the courts said it was up to the police. No one at ISP was available to speak about it.
Wink-wink. But no, I really don’t think the writer of the editorial, or the Weekly, is quite as naive as all that. After all, they’re intelligent, educated adults. So they understand that writing more laws, which will only infringe the rights of law abiding citizens (the key concept here is “law abiding“), will be meaningless to the hundreds of criminals, gang members, and the mentally disturbed, and more laws will ultimately be as ineffectual at stopping incidents of the sort we are all so disturbed by as the laws that we already have. Really Mr Hoffman, do you honestly think gun owners WANT to see these kinds of incidents?
Gun-rights advocates want their privacy, their freedom of expression and their borne arms..
..The Jason Hamilton shooting raises another question: What kind of culture truly believes that the answer to epidemic and deranged gun violence is more guns?
Let me ask YOU something as well. What kind of culture truly believes that more laws on the books is the answer to epidemic criminal activity of ANY kind? It hasn’t worked in Washington D.C. or Chicago or New York City, all of which boast, not less violent crime than all of Idaho, but rather more, including gun crimes committed by criminals with illegal guns! What’s your answer to that? Take away all the guns? Well, good luck with that. And even if you could, before you suggest doing that, because it sounds like you’re headed that direction, ask the Japanese or the Brits how that’s working for them… and then try Googling “knife crime”.
America does not have a gun problem, we have a criminal problem. Laws against things don’t work, and laws against criminals don’t either if you lack the conviction as a culture to actually deal with the criminals.
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