JOHN SHANKS is a liar and an advocate to take your freedoms away. The teeth to the US Constitution is the 2nd Amendment! Statistics show that gun violence is DOWN not up! His cigarette example is stupid! Kids still get, use sell and trade them eventhough there are laws against this. There are enough gun laws on the books and more and more gun laws will not stop criminals any more than the 20,000 laws that we already have! Does anyone cry out to ban matches when we know that it is not the matches but the arsonists who are at fault! How about vehicles? Ban them? More people, men, women, chidren, are killed every year on the roads than all the deaths of the Viet Nam war! Come on Shanks - the gun lobby is not to blame. Look at Australia where crime increased 300% AFTER national gun confiscation. The UK and any country where guns are illegal has tremendous crime rates. More gun control makes more crime!
GUN violence in America is on the rise. The number of gun deaths is escalating at an alarming rate. The problem is that it is way too easy for criminals, youth gangs, and other prohibited individuals to obtain and use firearms. Something must be done about the violence.
Last week, 35-year-old Toledo Police Detective Keith Dressel was shot and killed in the line of duty, allegedly by a young gun-wielding teenager just 15 years old, a youngster who might be tried as an adult and could face life in prison.
How do these young people get their guns? They are too young to buy them legally, so who supplies them with handguns? Shouldn't we as a society have sufficient safeguards in place to keep firearms out of the hands of our youth?
Common sense says yes; the gun lobby says no.
Under current law, both of the young people arrested after the shooting were prohibited from buying handguns. They were too young to go into a licensed firearms dealers and buy a handgun. The alleged shooter is too young to buy a pack of cigarettes, but we have laws on the books to keep young people from buying smokes, and a huge enforcement effort to go along with it. So why not guns?
The gun lobby has no rational argument as to why it continues to block common-sense measures that will keep guns out of the hands of criminals and safe from children. The gun lobby cannot and will not respond to the families of slain victims of gun violence and especially not those family members of a slain police officer.
Someone supplied this young man with the gun allegedly used to kill Detective Dressel, either through negligence or through an illegal sale.
We know that an estimated 40 percent of all gun sales are private, not through a licensed dealer, which means they are legal sales. In most states there is no requirement for background checks or record keeping for these secondary sales, and there is no requirement to ask for identification or determine whether the buyer is old enough to buy a gun.
The fact is many of these secondary sales, private transactions between two people, are fueling the criminal element with guns, including the gun used to kill Detective Dressel.
Enough is enough. It is time for the people to take a stand and stop the senseless deaths of our children, our adult citizens, and our public safety officers. These hidden sales need to be regulated.
Background checks and identification must be verified and records must be kept as to who is selling and who is buying guns in our communities. Then we would see an impact on gun crime, and a reduction in the senseless deaths of our citizens.
John Shanks is director of Law Enforcement Relations for the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence in Washington, D.C., and a former San Antonio police officer.
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