More calls for gun control after shootings in Virginia
WASHINGTON - Calling the shooting of 32 students at Virginia Tech last month a wake-up call, a leading gun control group called Tuesday for more restrictions on purchasing firearms -drawing criticism from a gun rights advocate who said the tragedy was being exploited to further an anti-gun agenda.
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„Thirty-two people were murdered at Virginia Tech”, Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. „That number, in and of itself, was not extraordinary. Every day in our country, on average about thirty-two people are murdered with guns”, he said. „When you add suicides and unintentional shootings, the death toll from guns in America each day is about eighty people. And for every death there are another two or three seriously injured”, Helmke continued. „The gun epidemic is our monthly 9/11, our weekly Katrina, a continuing Iraq war on our streets and in our schools. It is our daily Virginia Tech”, he declared.
A student at the Blacksburg, Va., campus on April 16 killed 32 students and faculty members before shooting himself.
Helmke attributed the situation to what he called „the insane, weak gun policies we have in this country”, adding that „even the few laws we have are not adequately enforced.” He called for effective background checks on would-be gun owners, for law enforcement agencies to be provided with „the best technology available”, and for the assault weapons ban to be reinstated.
Congress in September 1994 passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, prohibiting the sale of semi-automatic assault weapons manufactured after the ban. It expired in September 2004 under the law’s sunset provision, lacking the votes necessary to reauthorize it.
„Most Americans believe that guns are too easily available to dangerous people”, Helmke argued. „Most Americans believe that we should have tougher gun laws. Most Americans, including most gun owners, support the policy proposals I’ve suggested.”
Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, had strong words for the gun control lobby and others. „All that seems to be on the minds of many in the media and at the offices of gun control extremists is figuring out how to exploit this horrible tragedy to erode and eventually destroy the right, and the means, of self-defense”, he said Tuesday. „Good Americans possess the strength of heart and the ardor to protect their fellow human beings from being harmed”, Gottlieb said in a statement. „That is not the view that Washington anti-gun lobbyists hold. „In the aftermath -of the tragedy- they seek to capitalize on the situation in order to further their agenda, of the disarmament of the American people”, Gottlieb added. „They seek to make it a law, that the good people of the world are not even able to do anything in the face of evil. These tragedies should never happen, but they do when people are denied the means to fight back”, he said. „If we learn anything from this, it is the value of the Second Amendment and self-defense.” Helmke said the answer is fewer guns, not more.
„We have tried a system where guns are easily available”, he said. „We have tried a system where any felon or dangerous mental patient can buy the guns he wants from an unlicensed seller. We have tried a regime of easy access to assault weapons, and limitless gun sales. ”The result has been almost 30,000 dead each year”, he said. „What we are doing now isn’t working. We can do better.” (Crosswalk)
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