Seattle massacre lessons

Now we know the gun show loophole had nothing to do with Wednesday’s massacre.

This was the gun SHOP loophole, where any violent mentally ill person -like Ian Stawicki – can buy a gun as long as there is no official record of his mental or legal problems.

The reason that is allowed is because, as any defender of gun rights will tell you, “A gun doesn’t have a finger to pull the trigger or a brain to hate with.” [Alan Gottlieb, Second Amendment Foundation]

And that’s true.

And so, today, as we speak, people who have beaten up their girlfriends, who hear voices, or who are known by their families to be mentally ill but have never been committed, can legally buy one gun, two guns, three guns, four guns, five guns, even six guns – which is the number Ian Stawicki legally purchased.

A person like that could also buy as many knives, or as many clubs as he wanted to buy. He could not legally have bought a live hand grenade, a rocket launcher, or a Stinger missile athough, as is the case with a gun, none of those weapons has “a finger to pull the trigger or a brain to hate with.”

And yet we have managed to live with laws that prohibit anyone from buying those specific weapons.

In this armed world we’ve created, it looks like the only immediate recourse the rest of us can take is what the mentally ill and various other temper-impaired shooters have been doing: buy weapons.

Armed good Samaritans might have done more. The man who bravely attacked Stawicki with a stool at Cafe Racer could have drawn his gun and fired, which would have stopped the violence right there. The woman who saw him about to shoot Gloria Leonidas, the SUV driver, could have shot first.

Based on their descriptions in the newspaper these two, brave as they were, don’t strike me as the kind who could open fire on another human being.

That’s the problem with a lot of the good guys: we aren’t ruthless enough. In order to prevent more regulation of firearms, we have ended up giving a fatal advantage to the least regulated among us.