This is one of those tragedies that did not need to happen:
A man repeatedly shot his adult son and two sisters-in-law in his living room, killing them in front of his terminally ill wife, then fatally shot himself on the front porch as family tension about the cancer-stricken woman's care apparently boiled over, authorities said.
An earlier dispute about whether the woman should have been fed tea and toast or the orange her husband had peeled for her apparently set off the shooter Monday, 63-year-old Paul Gilkey.
Gun control advocates will argue, "There ought to be gun control laws to prevent people like this from getting guns!" But it's too late for that:
Gilkey, known as David or Dave because he went by his middle name, served a decade in prison beginning in 1974 for killing a man in Athens County in May of that year, according to court records. He also had a 1986 arrest for felonious assault, according to the sheriff.
Felons are disqualified from firearms ownership for life, prohibited from purchase, and checked by the national background check system. Even those who have some question about whether
all felonies should be lifetime disqualifiers generally agree that
violent felonies
should be lifetime disqualifiers.
You point out the failure of public officials to serve the public on the local level. The same failure, I believe, has been demonstrated on the state level when Governor Arnold Schwartzenegger and Attorney General Edmund G. "Jerry" Brown Jr. declined to defend the stated will of the voters in California's Proposition 8 victory and in the failure of U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to act against New Black Panther Party voter intimidation in New York.
ReplyDeleteVotes and elections count on every political level in this country.
Thank you, Clayton.