XDA

Perhaps you heard of the recent tragic shooting in a Maryland mall which took the lives of two, apparently random innocents before the shooter self-executed. The shooter was a 19 year old skateboarder who had no criminal record and used a shotgun which he had purchased legally a month before the shooting. I'm willing to bet a substantial sum that if he had registered to vote he was registered as a Democrat. Here is a typical lefty response to the senseless crime from Dana Milbank at the Washington Post:

If you think it’ll be a month of Sundays before this country gets serious about gun violence, you’re probably underestimating.

It’s already been nearly three months of Mondays — 77, to be exact — and we’re not making progress.

No progress, huh? The shooting took place in Maryland.


Maryland was already a state that heavily infringed on gun ownership. After the tragedy in Newtown, the Democrats in the state legislature passed several new bills which were called America's toughest new gun control laws. The bills banned the sale of 45 named, semi-automatic firearms which have sufficient cosmetic design features to meet the bill's arbitrary and historically inaccurate definition of 'assault weapon', banned the sale of box magazines with a capacity greater than ten rounds, required that handgun purchasers be fingerprinted and pass a training class in order to obtain a handgun license, (and they were already registering all handguns sold) and required much more invasive-to-privacy forms to be used to purchase firearms, which forms barred persons who had been involuntarily committed to a mental health institution from possessing firearms (which prohibition was already a federal law). Democrat Governor O'Malley, who was all smiles that day, bragged about the expected efficacy of these laws against mass shootings when he signed them last May. He said, inter alia,

"We've chosen to take action by advancing the strategies that work to save lives." 

Perhaps not as efficacious as hoped. The new laws didn't work and no lives were saved.

We already have laws against mass shootings. They're called criminal statutes, specifically the murder and aggravated assault statutes. If the shooters are not going to obey those statutes, which can carry severe prison sentences, the little ones about how mean your gun can look and how many bullets can you fire before reloading (in a few seconds) are not going to do a thing to stop them. However the worthless laws will punish the law abiding shooting enthusiasts, which I guess is the real but unstated point of the new legislation.

Labels: Unconstitutional Gun Legislation That Does Not Work; Maryland