Kathleen Parker
Opinion writer April 9, 2013










Meanwhile, what about my neighbor, Mike, who, theoretically, wants to buy a shotgun I no longer use? Is it really practical to insist that he submit to a background check? Gun-control proponents would have Mike and me run down to Dick’s Sporting Goods (or some other “portal”) and run through a quick background check. We could do that. Or I could just give Mike the gun and he could hand me a couple hundred dollars one of these days.

If a law isn’t enforceable, is it a good law? Does it prevent Newtown for neighbors to run through a little ritual that creates yet another level of government oversight for no real practical purpose other than to create a gun registry, which gun-control advocates insist they don’t want?

But we have to do something, don’t we?


Ann Telnaes animation: The consequences of a GOP filibuster on gun control. (Ann Telnaes/The Washington Post)

Limiting the size of magazines also seems like a common-sense solution. Then again, maybe a killer simply would carry several small magazines and swap them out, as Eric Harris did at Columbine High School in 1999 and Seung-Hui Cho did at Virginia Tech in 2007. Harris was armed with a Hi-Point 995 carbine with 13 magazines of 10 rounds each. His partner, Dylan Klebold, carried a semi-automatic handgun and a short-barrel shotgun, which, gun experts will tell you, is the most effective close-range weapon of all. And Cho used two handguns that are not considered “assault weapons.”

In a country with an estimated 250 million to 300 million guns, imposing new laws on honest people is problematic and bureaucratically complicated. Add to the conundrum our politics of individual freedom combined with the exploitation of emotion to craft what is likely an impotent solution, and it is little wonder our congressional leadership is bamboozled.


This is not to say we should do nothing. But, lest we delude ourselves, whatever we do we will do because it makes us feel better. Perhaps that is enough.
