This time it was a Waffle House in Nashville, Tennessee in the middle of the night. A man who should never have had a gun pulled up to the restaurant, got out of his car, and opened fire with everyone’s favorite assault weapon, the AR-15. Two people were shot and killed in the parking lot. Two more were killed when the shooter burst into the restaurant. As we’ve seen before, one person stood up to stop the madness. Twenty nine year old James Shaw had stopped in the restaurant on his way home from a nightclub. He was only there because the first Waffle House where he stopped was too crowded. He wrestled the gun from the shooter as he was reloading, and pulled him outside the restaurant before the man ran away. He was naked from the waist down, but he did have on a green jacket. All the victims were in their twenties. Twenty nine year old Travis Reinking was taken into custody the next day while hiding behind his apartment complex.
Reinking is exactly the kind of person who shouldn’t be anywhere near a gun. He had been reported driving around with an AR-15 in his trunk in Illinois, and then diving into a public pool wearing a women’s pink housecoat. He once complained to a police office that singer Taylor Swift was stalking him. Reinking had been stopped last July by the Secret Service trying to force his way onto the White House grounds. After the Illinois incident, police revoked his firearms license, and transferred his weapons to his father. His father gave them back to his son including the AR-15 used in the Waffle House.
Every time this happens, and it will happened again, we hear the same arguments from the NRA about it’s not the gun, it’s the bad guy with the gun that’s the problem. We don’t need anymore gun restrictions. We should just enforce the laws already on the books. Stay away from our constitutional rights. But there may be crack in the wall of gun owner resistance to common sense. The New York Times reports today “Do Gun Owners Want Gun Control? Yes, Some Say, Post-Parkland”. They talked to gun owners who want to ban high-capacity magazines, and order dangerous people to give up their guns. The story quotes Doctor Sterling Harding, who is a gun owner, including an assault rifle, as saying, “…gun owning Americans should be leading the debate on gun laws. It just makes sense to me that if I own weapons, I should be the first one to be advocating for safety with those weapons.” His thinking about guns changed when children wounded in a Kentucky school shooting were flown to his hospital.
The Times story goes on to quote a survey that shows that 47 percent of gun owners support a ban on assault weapons, but only 30 percent of NRA members support a ban. Another poll showed 50 percent of gun owning households favor stricter gun laws. These could be the people who make the difference in bringing reason and sanity into the gun debate. The biggest obstacle to gun safety and regulation is the NRA and the elected officials who have taken money from the organization to keep their jobs. The NRA claims it has five million members. There are about 60 to 70 million gun owners in the country. Banning assault weapons, which was once the law, before congress let the ban expire, outlawing high capacity magazines, universal background checks for all gun sales, no guns for people with mental health issues, no guns for people on the no fly list, and mandatory gun safety training and gun locks do not infringe on anyone’s rights. This argument that the Second Amendment forbids any reasonable regulation of gun ownership is nonsense. Think about those students dying in the hallways at the Parkland high school, or the people sitting in that Waffle House in the middle of the night when gunfire lit up the darkness. It’s time for gun owners to come out of the darkness and see the light.
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