NJ Gov. Christie Seeks Expanded Gun Checks, Video Game Crackdown

It's becoming more evident that Chris Christie wont be running for President, at least not on the Republican ticket. New Jersey is already the second most anti-gun state in the country, with California as #1. Yay! At any rate, he still has a huge lead in his re-election bid, so I guess he's a true believer when it comes to trashing the Second Amendment and proposing useless, emotion-based laws that serve only to expand government power.

 New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is seeking expanded background checks for gun purchases and parental consent for minors to buy violent video games as part of his response to the school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

   Christie, a first-term Republican seeking re-election, also wants to ban purchases of the .50-caliber Barrett rifle, and to make it easier for doctors and courts to commit “potentially dangerous” people to mental-health treatment against their will. His proposals come a week after a task force he created in January released 50 recommendations to reduce violence.

Now, I'm not sure how many crimes have been committed with a $7,000, 30 lb, five foot-long rifle, that fires rounds costing over $4.00 a pop. But I'm willing to bet the number is around zero. If someone knows of an instance in which one of these babies was hoisted through a car window on a Chicago drive-by, I'd love to hear about it.

Over 90% of gun homicides are committed with handguns in urban areas, with young, minority males being the most overrepresented perpetrators and victims. Of course there's also the innocent bystanders killed in the crossfire, but guns aren't the reason those lives are being lost. Addressing that issue would take some courage that most politicians don't possess. Evidently, those deaths don't mean much as compared to shamelessly grandstanding on a pile of dead white kids for political purposes. 

In so far as violent video games are concerned, there's been no consistent empirical evidence that shows a correlation, much less a causation linking those games to violent behavior. But it's always easier to blame inanimate objects rather than the people who commit crimes, or to scrutinize the environment in which they were raised.

Making it easier to commit the dangerously mentally ill is an idea with merit. There was a time when it was too easy to institutionalize people, and the laws were used for many nefarious purposes. Now the pendulum has swung the other way for too long. Most of the shooters in these terrible massacres were later found to be visibly and notably over the edge before their crimes. But current laws don't protect them or us.