Letter | Hold those who helped ‘evil’ people get guns responsible for their crimes

Re: July 5 letter by Michel Hall, “Charleston shooting: Time to ban hand guns and fight racism”

Perhaps Mr. Hall should have checked some statistics before writing his letter.

The Supreme Court has ruled against former Attorney General Eric Holder three times on the intent of the Second Amendment language and meaning. Just because Mr. Hall believes “the Founding Father’s envisioned muskets as a right” and not handguns does not change the intent. Likewise, the Father’s did not envision the income tax, abortion or same-sex marriage. That is the beauty of our Republic, like it or hate it, our Constitution is always evolving.

I will agree that a handgun in the hands of a sick person is a dangerous thing. But before blaming Dylann Roof, blame the person responsible for him having a gun in the first place. Like Adam Lanza in Connecticut, the person responsible was a parent. Lanza’s mother, certainly aware her mentally disturbed son should not have access to a gun, decided to help “mainstream” her son by teaching him to load and shoot a gun.

Roof’s story is even worse. You have a twice ninth-grade dropout, convicted of a felony a month before his 21st birthday for drug possession, who could not purchase a gun under federal guidelines by himself is given a handgun under a “straw purchase” by his father in violation of said federal law.

The cities with the most stringent handgun laws in America are the ones with the most homicides. Blame the district attorneys, defense attorneys and public defenders for this miscarriage of justice. Federal laws demand an automatic 10 years in prison for violent crimes with a handgun, even longer for a felon. Guess which charge is the first to be plea bargained away in order to cut court costs? The 10 years!

Mr. Hall also used Great Britain as a shining example of how civilization should act. Here are the facts: Both Alabama and Louisiana are each about the same size geographically as Britain. Alabama had 189 homicides in 2013 (last year for stats) per 100,000 people, while Louisiana had 204 per 100,000. Great Britain had 904 per 100,000, which were not by handguns since they have banned them, but by knives, baseball bats and farm tools. Let’s get on that bandwagon and start removing anything that can kill someone. Britain also counts multiple homicides as a single event.

And finally, legal gun owners have a 99.999 percent record of not committing violent crime with any gun. These are FBI stats. I can place a handgun on my front porch for hours at a time and it hurts no one. No gun will fire without someone’s hand on it. The secret is to isolate those with evil intent so these crimes do not occur.

If that means holding someone other than the shooter responsible for allowing or giving a weapon to a disturbed person, then let’s do it.

The writer lives in Little River.

This story was originally published July 24, 2015 at 6:23 PM with the headline "Letter | Hold those who helped ‘evil’ people get guns responsible for their crimes."