LTE: Courtland Milloy Challenged on Anti-Gun View

In response to a column by Courtland Milloy in the Washington Post this past week, I submitted a letter to the editor. The Post published my letter this morning. Here it is:

Columnist Courtland Milloy’s anti-gun screed was as inaccurate as it was unfair ["This gun safety stuff is a piece of cake," Metro, Aug. 4].

Perhaps if he had paid attention in his safety class instead of nitpicking about the crime examples or lambasting his instructor for once innocuously dropping a part of a gun, he might have learned some useful facts.

Like, for example, step two in getting a concealed-carry permit is not to move to Virginia, since Virginia will issue permits to nonresidents. Or that violent crime can occur in restaurants just as easily as it can occur on the street or in a bank. Or that almost every mass shooting in the United States over the past 20 years happened in places where guns are prohibited (i.e., where the law-abiding victims had no means of defense).

Or that his home state of Maryland, with its draconian gun laws, has a violent crime rate approximately 245 percent higher than Virginia’s [note: I calculated this with data from the FBI's 2008 'Crime in the United States' report; the Post cited it differently]. Perhaps Mr. Milloy really should consider moving across the river, where the government still trusts the people to secure their own safety. As the old saying goes, “When seconds count, the police are only minutes away.”