Howell Raines (AP Photo/John Marshall Mantel)
The quote of the day is presented by Guns.com
Former New York Times executive editor Howell Raines was forced out in disgrace back in 2003 for publishing the fakest of fake news. Now, he’s interrupted his retirement to take to the pages of the august Washington Post to indulge his Fudd-ish sensibilities. Given his vast experience as a hunter and gun owner, Raines wants to offer up a solution for America’s supposed “gun violence” crisis.
Raines’ brainstorm is…to go back to the gun laws of the 1960s. But we’re pretty sure that Raines hasn’t done his homework here.
Is he really proposing the end of Form 4473s? Does he want actual machine guns to be back in production and available as easily as suppressors are now? Is Raines in favor dismantling the FBI’s NICS background check system? Does he envision mail order (now internet-purchased) firearms delivered direct to your door by the Big Brown Truck?
It seems Mr. Raines is confusing his sepia-toned, good-old-days memories of the guns of his youth with the laws that regulated them (or didn’t). And no one at the Washington Post knows enough about guns or gun laws to raise the point before running the op-ed.
But that’s OK…where do we sign up?
As a hunter who has owned firearms since adolescence without breaking any laws or feeling under-gunned, I think I am equipped to offer a modest proposal that could produce a safer America and also break the maniacal hold of the National Rifle Association on the nation’s recreational shooters, not to mention Congress.
My proposal is simply that we revert to the gun laws that prevailed in the United States around 1960. From a public-safety standpoint, that was far from a perfect world. The cheap revolvers called “Saturday night specials” ruled the night in many cities. Loopholes as to the sale and registration of long arms allowed the importation of the mail-order rifle that Lee Harvey Oswald used to kill President John F. Kennedy in 1963.
Yet law-abiding hunters and target shooters had all the weapons and firepower they needed and were not in a state of constant turmoil over state and federal laws that restricted most shotguns to three rounds and most semiautomatic rifles and handguns to fewer than 20 rounds. American gun and ammunition manufacturers such as Remington, Winchester and Colt were thriving. Nobody argued that a six-shot revolver was inadequate for home-protection emergencies. Deer and elk hunters who used larger caliber rifles felt amply equipped with standard magazines of a half-dozen or so shells.
– Howell Raines in To fix our gun crisis, we should revert back to ’60s gun laws
