Making Illegal Things Illegaller

I clicked over to Salon magazine a few minutes ago and saw an editorial by news editor Joan Walsh. There’s a bunch of stuff in it and I don’t have the time to get into it. Just a few samples are in order.

• She defends the Department of Homeland Security’s recently withdrawn report on right-wing extremism.
• She points to Holocaust Museum shooter, James von Brunn as an example of whom the report described.
• She wonders if right-wing talk is inspiring the likes of von Brunn.

One throwaway line in the last paragraph really got me (as if there wasn’t enough heartburn material in her piece). She wonders, “How von Brunn, a felon who'd used a gun in his earlier crime, still had the right to carry a gun, I'll never understand.”

She betrays a very typical liberal ignorance of gun laws with that one statement. Von Brunn had no right to carry a gun. He would commit a felony if he so much as held a gun or possessed one cartridge. It still didn’t stop him from illegaly acquiring a gun and ammunition. Other laws didn’t prevent him from shooting another human being. Other people with guns stopped his attack.

If people want to agitate for gun control that’s their right. But, they should know the gun laws they hope to change. If they don’t, they find out they’re trying to make something that is already illegal, well, illegal. That’s just dumb.