Baltimore Mayor Calls for Tougher Gun Laws, Interesting Fact Noted

While we support law enforcement (even if we call out their fobbles from time to time), we realize that crime in our nation’s cities remains a problem. But we found an interesting fact in a story in The Baltimore Sun, which noted how the city’s incoming mayor, Stephanie C. Rawlings-Blake, is calling for tougher gun laws. The laws in this case we actually agree with, where use of a gun is added to a criminal’s charges when arrested (i.e. “use of handgun in commission of a crime”), but it is this passage that we found interesting:

“Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III tried to steer the focus back to the legislation, saying that 26 percent of the guns seized in Baltimore last year were long guns.”

This is notable because many cities make it so much harder to own handguns. In New York for example, you need a different permit for long guns (rifles and shotguns) as you do for handguns. Two different offices handle these permits, and these aren’t even located in the same borough of New York City let alone the same building.

Now we worry that the anti-gun zealots will use this as ammo to say, “all guns are bad,” but we’ll flip the argument and say, “see if criminals can’t get handguns they’ll use rifles,” and to make our point, “if they can’t use rifles, they’ll use bats, axes or sticks with a nail.” Criminals, in other words will use anything they can as a weapon.