The big news today, well, yesterday, is that AG Eric Holder plans on reinstating the Federal assault rifle ban which was signed into law during Bill Clinton’s presidency, and was not renewed during Bush’s.

I oppose this move, and allowing it to expire was one of the few things I liked about Dubya. Yes, I wish our former president had actually taken advantage of his political clout to push through some sort of Federal CCW law nationwide. (Yeah … I can’t find something nice to say about him without finding something to criticize, too!)

Despite what people might think, I am not some right-wing conservative. I didn’t vote for McCain, and I didn’t cheer Palin. I voted for Obama. I’m not some liberal nut who’s getting his politics confused, either, I’m actually pretty moderate (with admittedly liberal sympathies).

I’m not going to talk too much about the Second Amendment here — that’s the wrong conversation. And the reason it’s the wrong conversation is because there is a method to legally change the Constitution (we call them ‘Amendments’), and so it isn’t enough to say that gun ownership is a right, rather, it must be argued why gun ownership should continue to be a right.

There is a lot of talk about the vicious “Nanny State”, and while the right-wing blogosphere blows it out of proportion, there is some truth in what they say: namely, that when government starts treating its citizens like they are incapable of making decisions for themselves, government might just kind of be a little too intrusive. There are a lot of laws — sodomy laws as anti-homosexual legislation, co-habitation laws to prevent unmarried couples from shacking up with each other — which aren’t much more than government’s clumsy attempt to legislate morality.

Guns are not sexy. They aren’t safe, either. A big mistake the pro-gun crowd often makes is to liken a gun to a hammer, or a car: someone can bludgeon you to death with a hammer, they’ll point out, and, well, they’re right in the technical sense. On the other hand, a hammer isn’t designed as a weapon, and make no mistake, that’s what guns are: weapons, designed to kill as effectively as the user is capable of utilizing said weapon.

Which is, uh, sort of the point. If you own a gun, it’s likely either because you like to hunt, or because you believe that for whatever reason, at some point, you might have to use it against someone. There’s nothing wrong with either of those, with the caveat that some of the people for whom the second part of that sentence applies might be buying a gun with the express intent of robbing a bank, or killing a rival in a drug war.

I completely understand Vittoria’s reaction to this story, in which a kid fired a shotgun and killed his father’s pregnant girlfriend and her unborn child. I think her reaction is normal, and I think her response, particularly the latter part of it, is right on point:

[W]hy did the kid think that shooting someone was OK enough to do, but bad enough to lie about it when the police questioned him. Why was this gun not locked up – was it for similarly unconcerned-parenting reasons that led this little child to feel that shooting a person, killing her and a baby that could probably have survived if only someone had found the woman before hours had elapsed?

Ultimately, gun ownership is about responsibility. You can try to legislate responsibility, but it’ll always fail. And the quick reaction to pass new laws is almost always going to be a bad idea: the simple matter is, I believe, that these sorts of laws are almost always passed because of the conduct of the exception to the rule. Or, to the multiple exceptions to the rule.

There’s an interesting write up on the assault rifle ban here. The ban strikes me as largely cosmetic — really, what’s the practical difference between an AK-47 with a fixed stock versus a collapsible stock? Seriously, what’s the point?

On a political note, what exactly is the point? Gun control is a dead issue: Pelosi knows this, Reid knows this. Obama won the presidency by a landslide, and he’s building a lot of support. This is only going to turn people away from him at a time when he shouldn’t be. Frankly, there are a lot more things, considerably more pressing, that he should be using his political clout for.