In an uninformed rant about a one-gun-a-month law proposed by Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the dailypress.com completely ignored the fact that it is already illegal for straw purchasers to buy handguns in Virginia and then sell them on the streets in New York.
The editorial, headlined “How Many Guns Do You Need?” concludes, “An ordinary citizen shouldn't need to buy more than 12 guns in a year, and a dangerous one shouldn't be able to.”
Limiting the number of guns law-abiding people can buy doesn’t actually have anything to do with straw sales, which already break federal laws. In truth, one-gun-a-month laws set a bad and unconstitutional precedent, namely, that government can limit the frequency with which a law-abiding citizen may exercise a constitutionally protected right. The delay between purchases that the laws impose has been arbitrarily set at 30 days, implying that the limit on the exercise of that right could, in an equally arbitrary fashion, be changed to “one per year,” “one per lifetime” or “none ever”; and/or extended to rifles and shotguns. By the same logic, similar limits could be imposed upon the exercise of other constitutionally protected rights, such as attending organized religious services and publishing political commentaries.
Perhaps the Daily Press would advocate just as strongly for a one-editorial-a-month law?
