GunControlKills.com in LoUiSiAna

The April 16 guest column by Heidi Yewman, “Gun advocates ignore lessons of Columbine,” was an entertaining reminder of the glory days of the gun control movement. The headline refers to the lessons of Columbine, which Yewman obviously interprets as a need for more and stricter gun laws, including background checks at gun shows, a ban on so-called assault weapons and the ability to sue gun makers. Let’s take these one at a time.

Although it is extremely rare for criminals to obtain their guns at gun shows (fewer than 1 percent, according to government studies), one of the Columbine guns was purchased at a show by what is known as a straw purchaser someone with a clean record who plans to give the gun to someone else. This was illegal then and still is today. Background checks at gun shows would not have saved a single Columbine student.

Yewman also favors a ban on what she calls assault weapons. She says the Federal Assault Weapons Ban expired in 1994. Actually, this poorly conceived law was allowed to expire in 2004, 10 years after it was enacted in 1994. This means that the ban was in full effect at the time of the Columbine tragedy in 1999. It did not save a single Columbine student. It accomplished nothing beyond boosting the careers of some pandering politicians.

Yewman states that a 2005 law provides gun manufacturers and sellers with immunity from prosecution. This is a grossly inaccurate and dishonest description of the law, which is aimed quite narrowly at preventing the kind of politically motivated civil suits that were intended to drive gun manufacturers out of business. The new law does not give blanket or general immunity from prosecution.

This kind of fuzzy thinking is typical of anti-gun lobbyists, who never let facts get in the way of a good story or tarnish their dream of a world without guns.

A different lesson

Personally, I derived a much different lesson from Columbine. Violent people will always have access to dangerous materials, be it guns, knives, fists, explosives, poison or gasoline. They will find a way around inconvenient laws or simply ignore them. In my opinion, the failure of gun control laws to protect us from violence is beyond dispute. Giving up more personal responsibility and giving the government more control over our lives is not the answer; fighting back against criminals and lunatics is. We have learned this lesson the hard way in recent years. The government could not protect us from a gang armed with box cutters or gangs of looters following natural and man-made disasters.

The gun controllers’ utopian dream is an utter myth. The world will remain a violent and dangerous place for the foreseeable future, and individuals must have the means to protect themselves. There is no substitute for a gun when violent men invade your home, when looters are in the streets or during the long, nerve-racking wait for police to respond to your 911 plea for help.

Making gun ownership more difficult for good people simply makes life easier for the bad. Most Americans and Washingtonians know this, which is why the gun control movement has been in decline. If it weren’t for a few billionaires keeping them afloat, there would be no movement today.

Michael S. Brown is a Vancouver optometrist and a member of Doctors for Sensible Gun Laws (www.dsgl.org)