In Gail Collin’s opinion article on the NY Times, she writes:

If Loughner had gone to the Safeway carrying a regular pistol, the kind most Americans think of when they think of the right to bear arms, Giffords would probably still have been shot and we would still be having that conversation about whether it was a sane idea to put her Congressional district in the cross hairs of a rifle on the Internet.

But we might not have lost a federal judge, a 76-year-old church volunteer, two elderly women, Giffords’s 30-year-old constituent services director and a 9-year-old girl who had recently been elected to the student council at her school and went to the event because she wanted to see how democracy worked.

Loughner’s gun, a 9-millimeter Glock, is extremely easy to fire over and over, and it can carry a 30-bullet clip. It is “not suited for hunting or personal protection,” said Paul Helmke, the president of the Brady Campaign. “What it’s good for is killing and injuring a lot of people quickly.”

There have been a lot of comments about the negative political atmosphere contributing to the violence that occurred in Arizona this past weekend. Blame as been pointing towards Sarah Palin’s cross hairs map. What concerns me is the ease with which individuals can buy and carry guns in public.

Gun rights activists say that guns don’t kill people, people kill people. People who are at risk of committing violent acts (convicted criminals, the diagnosed mentally unstable, batterers) should not be carrying guns.

There needs to be a federal law that allow people to have guns, but with limits. Congress let the ban of the sale of semi-automatic weapons expire in 2004. I really wish they would reinstate it.

I don’t like that that we have right to carry a gun that can hurt one person..but to have one that can kill innocent bystanders at the same time, seems really unnecessary.