While all the country gaped last week at the acrimony ensnarling the Federal government, Arizonans were treated to an additional, equally bizarre spectacle. You’ll be shocked to hear that a firearm was involved.
It was a classic case of he said/she said, but of a particular stripe hard to imagine outside Arizona, where guns are so fervently embraced that I imagine they rank above waffle irons as popular wedding gifts and make the occasional appearance at christenings, too.
In dispute was this: did a local lawmaker intentionally point her loaded .380 Ruger at a newspaper reporter during an interview, or was it all just a silly misunderstanding?
The reporter, Richard Ruelas, who writes for The Arizona Republic, said it was deliberate. Not hostile, mind you, but purposeful: State Senator Lori Klein was proudly showing off her piece. He told this story first in an article published on Sunday in The Republic, repeated it in subsequent public comments and went through it one more time on the telephone with me. He sounded incredulous still.
He said that, as he sat with Klein just outside the Senate chamber to discuss her gun-toting ways: “I looked down and saw a red dot on my chest.” He looked up and realized the dot was the laser sight of the Ruger, which she carries in her pocketbook. Although he wasn’t sure just then whether it had bullets in it, she informed him (after she’d lowered the pistol) that it always does.
The Republic article caused a public outcry that she had been reckless, as even Arizonans have their limits. She then disputed Ruelas’s account, saying that he had strayed into the gun’s sight as she demonstrated how it worked. After that she went silent. She didn’t respond to either a phone message I left at her senate office or an email I sent.
No matter. Anyone who focuses on where she was or wasn’t aiming can’t see the desert for the cactuses. And that desert spreads beyond Arizona, which may be extreme but is nonetheless illustrative. Massacre after massacre hasn’t changed this nation’s mind-boggling blitheness about guns.
The most recent massacre to dominate the country’s attention was, of course, in Arizona in January, when Jared Loughner fired off thirty rounds in fifteen seconds, killing six people and wounding thirteen, including United States Representative Gabrielle Giffords. A bullet ripped through her brain.
Just two days later, Klein, a state senate freshman, showed up for her swearing-in ceremony in Phoenix with her Ruger. “I pack heat,” she informed Senator Robert Meza, a fellow freshman who was walking alongside her, as he told me in a telephone interview last week. Her tone of voice, he said, was nonchalant.
After a security guard noted her gun, so did the news media. A public discussion ensued, and the senate’s president, Russell Pearce, a Republican, had to clarify the chamber’s rules. He said that, while signs posted outside said weapons were banned, that prohibition applied to visitors but not lawmakers, who could keep their guns with them. So Klein, also a Republican, did.
Citing the incident between her and Ruelas, Senator Steve Gallardo, a Democrat, called last week for an ethics probe into her actions, but the chairman of the ethics committee, Senator Ron Gould, a Republican, said it wasn’t necessary. Like Klein, he sometimes comes to the Capitol armed, according to local news reports.
You’d think Arizona would be cracking down on guns after the January bloodletting. You’d be wrong. Since then, not only did Pearce make clear that Klein and her colleagues could pack heat as they pleased, but state lawmakers voted expressly to allow guns on college campuses. Governor Jan Brewer, a Republican, had the good sense to veto that legislation. Sadly, she cited fuzzy language in it, not principle, as the reason.
It’s not entirely fair to single out Arizona. Just over a week ago, Wisconsin enacted a law allowing civilians to carry concealed weapons, and the state has been embroiled in a discussion about whether that creates the possibility of guns at Lambeau Field, where the Green Bay Packers play and passions, as well as intoxication levels, run high. This new law means that the only state that still forbids concealed weapons is Illinois, said Chad Ramsey, Federal legislation director for the Brady Campaign, a gun-control advocacy group.
Over the last three years, as Michael Luo recently reported in The New York Times, more than twenty states have passed measures enabling people who have been denied firearms because of mental illness to petition to have their rights to own guns restored.
And, on the Federal level, gun-control legislation promoted in response to the Giffords shooting has gone nowhere fast. The kind of high-capacity clip that enabled Loughner to get off as many rounds and shoot as many people as quickly as he did was illegal from 1994 to 2004, when the Federal assault-weapons ban expired, and there are bills in the House and Senate to make it illegal again. But they have Democratic sponsors only, Ramsey said, and have not been brought up for serious discussion.
President Obama hasn’t made gun control any kind of priority. Then again, how could he? An enormous unacknowledged cost of the protracted wrangling over the debt ceiling and the budget is the inability of politicians to devote energy and political capital to much of anything else.
Meanwhile, a cavalier attitude about guns persists and even flourishes. Klein, 57, a divorced mother of three who lives in a Phoenix exurb, told Ruelas that she bought a .40-caliber revolver eleven years ago after she was spooked by a rattling at her front door one night. She got the gun on Ladies Night at Shooter’s World. The Ruger came later. She owns several guns now. She wouldn’t specify the number. She said they make her feel safe. But she assured Ruelas that she doesn’t press that view on anyone else. “I don’t like chocolate ice cream,” she said, according to his article. “Am I going to force you not to have any?”
Firearms, Häagen-Dazs— it’s all the same. Her Ruger is pink, like a Barbie convertible. Showing it to Ruelas, she reportedly said: “Oh, it’s so cute.”
No, Senator Klein, it’s not. It’s a potentially deadly weapon. When are you and the rest of the country going to wake up to that?
Rico says this is a bad thing, no matter how you feel about gubs...
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