A Baltimore Sun deputy editor is so worried about the presence of legal firearms in her Maryland neighborhood, that she wants the federal government create a sex offender-type registry for all lawful gun owners.
“[H]ow about … a gun owner registry available to the public online — something like those for sex offenders. I’m not equating gun owners with predatory perverts, but the model is helpful here; I want a searchable database I can consult to find out whether my kid can have a play date at your house,” the Sun’s Tricia Bishop wrote Thursday.
Her suggestion comes on the heels of President Obama announcing this week that he would take executive action on gun violence. Part of his newly announced effort to address America’s “gun culture” will include requirements that private dealers obtain licenses and perform background checks for all peer-to-peer sales.
Licensed gun dealers are already required by federal law to perform background checks on all sales. Private dealers, however, are viewed differently by the law, and they are therefore not held to the same standards for sales. Obama’s new executive order is aimed largely at addressing this issue.
Bishop wrote that she came to the idea of a sex offender-type registry for gun owners when she realized she is more afraid of not knowing who in her neighborhood owns a gun than she is of Baltimore’s violent crime.
“I’m less afraid of the criminals wielding guns in Baltimore than I am by those permitted gun owners,” she wrote. “I know how to stay out of the line of Baltimore’s illegal gunfire; I have the luxury of being white and middle class in a largely segregated city that reserves most of its shootings for poor, black neighborhoods overtaken by ‘the game.'”
“The closest I typically get to the action is feeling the chest-thumping vibrations of the Foxtrot police helicopter flying overhead in pursuit of someone who might be a few streets over, but might as well be a world away,” she added. “But I don’t know where the legal gun owners are or how to ensure that their children, no matter how well versed in respecting firearms, won’t one day introduce that weapon to my daughter.”
She praised Obama for his attempts to address gun violence, but added he could take it a step further by creating something like a federal registry for legal gun owners. Bishop said she is perfectly comfortable with the idea of including her gun-owning friends and family on the list, because she’s simply terrified by the thought of a gun in a house.
“My folks were taught how to handle guns and use them safely,” she wrote. “But that doesn’t do much to allay my fears; it’s the simple presence of the weapon in the home and the possibilities it presents that terrify me.”
The benefits of having a firearm in the home are simply outweighed by the threat it poses, she concluded, citing statistics on accidental shootings and suicides.
“Gun owners may feel picked on, but they are not a persecuted class. They are individuals who have chosen to keep in their homes an object whose chief purpose is to injure or kill, whether in self defense or otherwise,” she wrote, making one final pitch for her national gun-owner registry.
“The rest of us should have a right to know it’s there before we — or our children — enter,” she added.
