Arizona's "love affair with guns came under new and intense scrutiny Saturday after a gunman began spraying bullets outside a Tucson-area supermarket, killing six people including a 9-year-old girl and a federal judge, and wounding 14 others, among them U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords," writes Daniel González, Alia Rau and Ron Hansen of the Arizona Republic. The state has some of the laxest gun control laws in the U.S., including recently passed laws that allows residents to take guns into bars and carry a concealed weapon without a permit. In the upcoming legislative session, Rep. Jack Harper is introducing a bill that will allow university and community-college faculty to carry guns on school grounds.
The debate in Arizona takes two forms, write the reporters: everyone should be armed or make gun laws more restrictive. The Pima County sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, said after the shooting that Arizona is the "Tombstone of the United States of America" and assailed the state's lax gun laws as a possible contributor to Saturday's massacre. Harper's response, "The Giffords event was in Sheriff Dupnik's jurisdiction and no law enforcement was present. Sheriff Dupnik should stop blaming others for his office's lack of presence at the event."
Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of "True West," a Cave Creek magazine devoted to Old West history, said Arizona's gun culture is rooted in the state's rural ranching past dating back to the mid 1800s, when people fleeing federal regulations flocked to Arizona and needed guns for hunting and protection. "There is a passionate, independent streak that Arizonans have to own firearms," Bell said. "They don't want to be usurped and they don't want to be told what to do and that runs deep in Arizona. . . . It is met now by modern culture where most of the state is urban but there is still a rural mindset, even among many of the people who live in the city." (Read more)
Politico.com reporters Molly Ball and Shira Toeplitz take a look at the lack of debate in Congress regarding gun laws following the shooting. In the past, after a similar type of incident, the National Rifle Association would launch a lobbying effort to "make sure lawmakers have their guns-don’t-kill-people talking points," writes Ball and Toeplitz. So far, Congressional staffers say they have not been contacted by the NRA. Jim Kessler, a former policy director for the now-defunct Americans for Gun Safety, said "the NRA is the most effective single-issue lobbying group in America." (Read more)
Propublica.org's Marian Wang details some of the issues around the Arizona gun laws.
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