If Not Gun Control, Glock Control

If Americans insist on handing out guns to disturbed young men, they should at least ensure they can only shoot one person at a time.

“It would be neat and tidy to blame this tragedy on America's love affair with firearms or its current state of partisan polarization,” writes the National Post’s Tasha Kheiriddin of Saturday's shooting in Tucson. “But the sad reality is that the assassination of public figures is hardly unique to the United States.” Possibly a valid point, but the examples she chooses to illustrate it (assassinations in fractious Pakistan and India, and the murder of Archduke Ferdinand) do little to dispel the notion that political assassinations are symptomatic of a deeply troubled nation. “That a gun was used also is not the issue,” she assures us, pointing to infamous American lone nuts Timothy McVeigh and Ted Kaczynski, who committed their crimes with bombs.

Sun Media’s Warren Kinsella and the Globe and Mail’s Margaret Wente both say that to blame politics for the actions of a confused, possibly deranged killer is pointless, but it would be equally unwise to discount the role that easy access to guns played in Jared Lee Loughner's attempt on Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords's life. The law allowed someone who was obviously disturbed to buy and legally conceal a semi-automatic weapon.

In an excellent piece in the New York Times, Gail Collins draws the important distinction between American’s love affair with firearms and outdated laws that don’t reflect modern gun technology. Surely the drafters of the Second Amendment didn’t anticipate the Glock the killer used, which holds 30 bullets that can be fired with incredible rapidity. “If Loughner had gone to the Safeway carrying a regular pistol, the kind most Americans think of when they think of the right to bear arms, Giffords would probably still have been shot … ” Colins writes. “But we might not have lost a 76-year-old church volunteer, two elderly women, Giffords’s 30-year-old constituent services director and a 9-year-old girl.”

Although none of these columnists mention it, here’s some disturbing food for thought: reportedly a Walmart employee refused to sell Loughner ammunition because he was acting strange. When a once-over from some flunky in a blue smock is more effective at keeping psychos and guns apart than gun control laws are, surely something is wrong.