Month: January 2008

We’ve been seeing a lot of this logic lately:

Hafter’s daughter, Lizzy Hafter, a Dean’s List graduate of the University of Virginia, was murdered in September 2006 on the Blue Ridge Parkway near Charlottesville, Virginia. The killer had stolen the gun weeks earlier. The gun had not been reported stolen. Lizzie’s mother is advocating for a law in South Carolina, Lizzy’s Law, to require gun owners to report to police a gun that has been lost or stolen.

How would this woman’s daughter have been saved if the gun had been reported stolen?  It’s a violation of federal regulations to have a firearm on the Blue Ridge Parkway in the first place, but does reporting the firearm magically remove it form the hands of the criminal?

It’s relatively easy to keep up on the activities of anti-gun bloggers, since there are so few of them.  Remember Nancy Robinson?  Who showed up at Yearly Kos whining that lefty bloggers wouldn’t pay attention to her pet issue?  She did start a web site Where Did the Gun Come From, but it looks like it doesn’t get updated much.

She’s back in the news in Boston:

“That created a sense of urgency,” said Nancy Robinson, a Newton resident with a teenage son who will serve as the coalition’s executive director. “We needed to move ahead.”

In 1990, the year Citizens for Safety was first formed, Boston had 152 homicides, the highest number on record. The group helped create after-school programs and jobs for city teenagers. They focused on compelling gang members to get together for basketball matches. They were among several grass-roots organizations whose work with police helped lead to the so-called “Boston Miracle.”

Color me skeptical that basketball can solve violent crime, but I’ll give kudos for the effort here.   I will take issue with this, however:

Robinson said she wants the group to have a national effect and be able to pressure federal authorities to enforce gun laws and urge legislators to pass new laws that would force stricter background checks on gun purchasers.

Police Commissioner Edward F. Davis and Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who are expected to attend the announcement, said they welcome the group’s return.

“We have a new start and new emergency and renewed commitment,” Menino said.

The group’s goals do not please everyone. Andrew Arulanandam, spokesman for the National Rifle Association, said new gun laws would not be effective.

“The reason that gun control laws don’t work is that they require the cooperation of a very unlikely source, and that is the criminal,” he said. “A criminal intent on committing a robbery or assault or whatever is not hindered by that law. He will do whatever, she will do whatever to get a gun.”

Nancy Robinson’s problem is that from the early 90s until now, background checks have been instituted nationally, and Massachusetts has passed numerous gun laws.  Why did crime go down in the 90s, but it is going up now, when gun laws nationall have not substantively changed, and gun laws in Massachusetts have just gotten more strict?  Maybe it was the basketball.