Shoot down Kaine vetoes

In the residual chill diffused in recent weeks by men bearing arms, the General Assembly gathers today to consider whether to override Gov. Timothy M. Kaine’s decision to veto five gun rights bills passed from lawmakers’ hands to his. Surging on the strength of a Supreme Court ruling last fall affirming individuals’ right to keep and bear arms, the gun lobby eagerly has anticipated victory. But as rivers of blood widen, assurance wanes.

Fifty-three souls nationwide fell from March 10 to Sunday, all of them sent from this life to the next by gunshots in mass killings. The victims included seven police officers, four killed March 22 in Oakland, Calif., after a traffic stop and three Saturday in Pittsburgh while responding to a domestic dispute. The latter tragedy occurred between two others – a Vietnamese immigrant gunned down 13 people Friday in Binghamton, N.Y., and later Saturday a man killed his five children and then himself in Graham, Wash.

Common threads weave through the seven incidents: in four of them, the suspects had either lost their jobs or were frustrated about their inability to find work; in two, they were driven to kill by marital strife or estrangement. All of the suspects are men. All bore arms but none bore more than a slight semblance of rationality.

It requires no particular psychiatric insight to recognize the madness of crimes like these and their perpetrators. Conceding as much reasonably means conceding the futility of authoring restrictions to prevent the horrors. Senselessness cannot be eradicated. Take away the guns, and troubled people will reach for other means of destruction, or simply acquire firearms illegally the way other criminals do.

But the argument is not so simple as some gun rights advocates contend. While the Supreme Court rightly has upheld the constructionist interpretation of the Second Amendment to refer to the right to bear arms as belonging to individuals rather than militias, there are parameters to that right and all others.

Defining those boundaries raises questions, as conservative columnist George F. Will explained in a column last fall: “What registration requirements, background checks, waiting periods for purchasers, ballistic identifications? What restrictions on ammunition. ... On the kinds of people ... who may own guns?” Such questions deserve real consideration, and thoughtful input from the pro-gun lobby to help carve sensible limits.

In the case of the bills vetoed by Kaine, the answers strike us as fairly distinct. Three of the bills would allow people to carry concealed weapons in restaurants. Similar laws are on the books in roughly two-thirds of the country. Kaine’s fellow Senate Democrats overwhelmingly backed these bills. We do, too.

A House bill would exempt military service men and women and members of the Virginia National Guard from the state’s restriction barring people from buying more than one revolver a month. Another bill would allow people seeking concealed handgun permits to take safety courses online. Like a majority of Democrats, we support these measures.

Kaine’s vetoes have betrayed the Second Amendment supporters he courted when he ran for office in 2005. We back gun rights and reject the tendency of some to view tragedy as sufficient cause for raiding the liberties of those who obey the law; the same view applies to the privacy incursions of the Bush administration after 9/11. With rights, as with guns, responsibilities come. The bills in question respect this principle.