Revive Sensible Gun Laws

By Clarence Page, Tribune Media Services on Apr 18, 2012

That's because it was illegal for Wright to own a gun after two previous weapons convictions in the early 1990s.

He posted bond and prosecutors later dropped the charges without further comment. He was relieved, he told reporters, yet also annoyed that police didn't return his gun.

Ironically, local experts speculated, Wright might not have been charged at all were it not for the extra scrutiny that the Martin tragedy has brought to self-defense cases. Better late than never, I say.

I'm not a zealot for banning all privately owned guns. I think, for example, two decades probably is enough good behavior to restore an 80-year-old entrepreneur's right to keep a firearm in his high-crime neighborhood.

Unfortunately, anything approaching reasonable, common-sense gun laws has become almost impossible against the zealotry from the other side.

Stand Your Ground laws, for example, are a great triumph of powerful lobbies like the National Rifle Association and their ultraconservative allies like the American Legislative Exchange Council, better known as ALEC. Lest they become victims of their own success, just about every victory they have seems to be followed by a push toward a new extreme.

As a result, the gun lobby pushes not only to pass extreme new laws like Stand Your Ground but also to roll back reasonable, common-sense reforms -- as when Virginia recently repealed its 19-year-old limit on personal handgun purchases to one per month.

"Common sense" is a widely overused term, yet it seems to me to suitably describe a limit of 12 new guns per year, especially to strike a blow against a criminal underground that gives law-abiding gun owners a bad name.

Bill Cosby made a good point when he recently said the debate over the killing of Trayvon Martin should be focused on guns, not race. There may be no more fitting memorial to the slain teen than to revive some common sense in our gun laws.

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E-mail Clarence Page at cpage(at)tribune.com.