Gun Control in a Soundbite

“Anti-gun lawmaker caught trying to board airplane with gun.”

Illinois state senator Donne Trotter of Chicago, spent the night in jail after trying to go through a TSA checkpoint at O’Hare with a pistol in his bag. Yes, he admits owning the pistol and claims he forgot it was there. He has been an advocate for gun control and has opposed granting concealed carry permits since he joined the senate in 1989.

This, to me, shows a person who wants to prevent other people from having guns but also wants to have them himself – the classic ‘the rules don’t apply to me’ mindset. While it gets very little press attention, this is a very common attitude in the anti-gun community.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from fiction – the highly anti-gun TV show “The West Wing” featured an almost entirely anti-gun cast of characters, but the supposedly anti-gun president at one point commented that he didn’t want the Secret Service agents defending his daughter to be discrete about the fact that they were carrying firearms. ‘I’m carrying a fully loaded gun and the safety’s off’. Its fine for MY daughter to have people protecting her with firearms but not someone else’s daughter. Sure, its fiction, and The West Wing was infamous for getting their technical details wrong. Still, the show was highly accurate in presenting the attitudes and the level of information that the characters would have had they been real.

I’ll admit, there are things I feel safe and justified in doing that I do not feel are safe or justified for everyone. I do not, however, feel that there should be laws prohibiting them from doing such things. If there are such laws then they apply to me too and if I break them I deserve to be punished. In such cases I would prefer that any laws required training or a demonstration of competence (or both, of course) but protect the right of individuals who pass such tests to do the thing in question.

OK, that was a bunch of generalities. Let’s take an example. I think I’m a sufficiently skilled and conscientious driver that I should be permitted to operate a motor vehicle. I feel that quite a lot of people on the road should not be. I’d be very happy if in order to get a driver’s license you had to pass a period skills check that actually prevented a notable percentage of the adult population from driving. Said law would, of course, have to allow means by which someone could get training and experience in advance of the test (especially for first-time applicants). It would cost money to do this testing – so get part of it by increasing the license fee, and a bunch of it by increasing the gas tax or new car tax or something.

On the flip side, such a law would, in my opinion, be unconstitutional if applied to firearms – that pesky 2nd Amendment. Nevertheless I’d back a constitutional amendment that reasserted the individual’s right to keep and bear arms if it included a training/proficiency requirement. But I’d ONLY back a constitutional amendment to that effect – no lesser law could override the 2nd.

The law is the law, and Sen. Trotter would have done well to remember it.