Leonard Pitts Pushes For More Gun Control and Gun Bans in the Wake of Rep. Gifford's Resignation

Leonard Pitts Jr. is at it again in: Time to talk -- and really listen -- about guns.

The standard "let's be all commonsensical about it" followed by the "let's ban stuff" approach, while dancing in the blood of the Giffords shooting and her subsequent resignation as a member of Congress.

We need meaningful background checks on all gun purchases -- no loopholes. A mentally unstable man should not have legal access to a gun, period.
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We need to encourage gun safety classes so that poorly secured firearms stop ending up in the hands of little children.

Well, a system that prohibits the mentally ill from purchasing a firearm would be a good step, but the anti's plans for implementation tend to be execrable and the proposed cure likely worse than the mental disease that it will leave untreated.

How about we require those who have been committed for mental illness to be prohibited from buying a gun until they're certified as well by their doctors, and no other non-felon is prohibited from purchasing and carrying any weapon of their choice? Would that suffice for Mr. Pitts?

As for gun safety we already have a fine and experienced organization, among many others, that promotes and teaches such classes.

But, wait a sec, what does kids having unauthorized access to firearms have to do with the Giffords shooting? After all the shooter wasn't a child so this is a "for the children" pull on the heartstrings attempt to distract.

Here comes more of his common sense:

We need to ban fully automatic weapons from private use. The hunter who needs a gun that fires hundreds of rounds a minute isn't much of a hunter.

Really Mr. Pitts, that quick to ban knee jerk and the old "guns are only for hunting" canard?

Quick quiz sir, Since 1934 how many people have been killed with legally owned fully automatic weapons? We'll wait for your response......

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Crickets chirp. Paint dries on walls.....

Ok let's help Mr. Pitts out a bit.

The answer is one or at most possibly two, one of which was committed by a police officer. At most 2 killings in a 78 year span, certainly a reason to ban something now isn't it?

Then Pitts does the Obama both-sides-are-extremes-but-I'm-the-moderate-here thing:

At the very least, we need to have a serious national dialogue about these and other possible solutions.

But we won't. Too many on the political left still seem to harbor a fantasy of getting rid of all guns and refuse to distinguish between responsible gun owners and those criminals or deranged people who have no business with firearms. Too many on the political right still harbor the paranoid delusion that any talk of gun control is code for confiscation by jackbooted thugs riding black helicopters.

Well Pitts himself just called for banning and gun confiscation of a whole class of firearms in his editorial so he may not be so centric himself. If his reasonable discussion begins the conversation calling for gun bans, it is not reasonable at all.

If instead Pitts had solely editorialized that mentally unstable violent people need to be institutionalized and prohibited from owning firearms he would have had a valid point.

Instead, he tried to springboard the act of a single mental nutcase to slyly push for more gun control.

No thanks Mr. Pitts.

But, while you're on the topic about common sense gun control, would you mind editorializing about the Obama Administration's Fast and Furious gun walking program?

You know, the one that has killed well over two hundred times more people during the 4 years of his administration than have been killed by legally owned fully automatic firearms in the past 78 years?

I suspect we'll be waiting a long time for such an editorial from Mr. Pitts.