To the Editor: Guns are already being confiscated

The following letter to the editor of the Toledo Blade was submitted by Chad Baus, Buckeye Firearms Association's Secretary and published on December 22, 2013. Information the newspaper edited out is included in [brackets.]

In his column about the anniversary of the Sandy Hook massacre, Mr. Kushma states: "If you are a legal, responsible gun owner — and that puts you in the overwhelming majority — Big Bad Government is not coming to grab your guns, whatever the corporate gun lobby tells you in its fund-raising and political appeals."

That would be news to residents of Cook County, Ill., where the Wall Street Journal reported in July that teams of armed officers were going door-to-door grabbing guns from people who had failed to renew their state firearms registration cards on time. [Californians have recently had 11,000 firearms confiscated in a similar scheme.] And some still have to ask why gun owners in free states oppose registration schemes and firearms ownership databases.

[It's also news to people in New York state, where it was reported over the summer that persons pulled over for speeding have had their firearms inspected and seized for having two or three rounds "too much" ammunition in their self-defense guns, despite a law prohibiting such inspection of the firearm without probable cause. One has to wonder what Mr. Kushma would feel like if the "big bad government" similarly confiscated for his typewriter for having "too many" keys.]

Mr. Kushma is wrong in his assertion that nothing has been done since Newtown. Around the country and here in Ohio, more and more schools have chosen to allow armed good guys to protect our kids, correctly recognizing that the faster an attacker is confronted by an armed responder, the fewer people die.

That fact was borne out this month in Colorado, where a student with a gun took his own life just 80 seconds into his attack, after he was about to be* confronted by an armed school resource officer.

Many potential victims are alive thanks to that good guy with a gun, but people such as Mr. Kushma would have preferred the killer had 10 minutes to carry out his plans before police arrived. Shame on him.

CHAD BAUS

Archbold, Ohio

*There is no good reason for The Blade to have added the italicized words. Arapahoe County Sheriff Grayson Robinson told CNN "we know for a fact that the shooter knew that the deputy was in the immediate area and, while the deputy was containing the shooter, the shooter took his own life." That's not a description of an "about to be" confrontation.

Additional Information:
Gun Grabs: Blue-state seizures

New York City confiscating rifles and shotguns

Three Arrests Illustrate the Impact of New York's Silly Seven-Round Ammunition Limit