LA Times: Congress Should Mandate Gun Owners Lock up Their Firearms

The Los Angeles Times editorial board suggests Congress mandate gun owners lock up their firearms. For gun owners who do not have a safe, the Times suggests an alternative trigger lock requirement.

Will this put gun owners at a disadvantage when a criminal enters their home and a gun is needed for self-defense? The Times contends it will not because “vendors have designed trigger locks and gun safes that users can quickly access.” In an attempt to prove their point,  the Times actually undercut their claim by linking to an article that shows handgun safes adding up to three seconds to the time it takes to access a firearm.

Moreover, the Times did not examine how much that time increased if a person was under duress when trying to remember and/or enter the combination to open the safe. They also overlooked whether the biometric readers–used on some of the safes–read fingerprints if the finger is wet, muddy, or caked with blood.

The Times pointed to a new gun control study and claimed that gun storage laws would reduce “accidental gun deaths” among children.

They did not discuss 2010 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention numbers that show the number of children under age of ten unintentionally killed in fire-related deaths was over seven times higher than the number of children killed in unintentional gun-related deaths, and the number of children killed in unintentional drowning deaths was 16 times higher than the number of children killed in unintentional gun-related deaths.

Those numbers are important because accidental gun deaths declined even further, totaling only 489–all ages combined–by 2015.

AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com. Sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange.