Louise Slaughter brought up the specter of the Gifford’s shooting as a reason to vote against HR822:
“This is a pretty serious piece of work for me today because less than a year ago, one of our colleagues from Arizona was shot in the head while she was trying to convene with her constituents outside a supermarket,” Slaughter said, recalling the shooting that left six people dead and Giffords seriously wounded. “The horrible shooting of our colleague wouldn’t have been stopped with the passage of today’s bill, and no one is made safer by allowing guns in the public space.
Does Slaughter really think Laughner, who is completely out of his gourd, would have been influenced over whether or not it was lawful for him to carry the gun on his way to murder a groups of people including a Congresswoman?
The Giffords shooting was a failure of the mental health system. Letting crazy people wander the streets unmedicated and untreated is potentially dangerous.
Despite what VPC, Brady and MAIG would have you believe, Loughner was not legally carrying a concealed weapon. In fact Arizona prohibits carrying a concealed weapon when the carrier has intent to commit a crime.
I knew it was only a matter of time before the anti-freedom gun grabbers used Giffords, just like Brady, as a rationale for gun control. It was good that he was subdued quickly by those at the scene, but it could have been worse and a viable response would be the arrival of someone with a gun (the citizen who ran to the gunfire or a police officer later). How would the disproportionate disarming of decent citizens with draconian gun control laws have stopped a crazed killer who would get one by other means? Limiting our right to keep and bear arms just means that there will be no good guys on the scene of any future massacre.
Any government official who is uncomfortable with my firearms does not trust its citizens and is unworthy of their office. Only a despot wants to make sure that I am unarmed. The tool is unimportant; the intent and the actions define the evil. I must not be judged to be dangerous if I have not proven it to be true (i.e. if a violent felon). To be treated as such just because I want a firearm for self-defense is highly insulting.