Westneat: State has a strict gun law, but it applies only to hunters

If you want to tote a gun around in the cities or suburbs where the people live, though, you don’t have to know so much as where the trigger is. To buy a gun or get a permit, no one judges your attitude, let alone your egregious muzzle control.

I bring this up at the request of several readers who, like me, are haunted by what happened in the Mukilteo mass shooting July 30. Especially the part about how the 19-year-old alleged shooter bought a semi-automatic AR-15 rifle with high-capacity ammo clips at the sporting-goods store, but was so green on how to fire it that he studied the gun’s instruction manual for two hours outside a party before killing three former classmates and wounding another.

“Why not challenge the public to just adopt the hunting gun rules for the general public?” suggested reader Gary Decker, of Seattle. Challenge accepted. Twenty-five states have a gun-literacy requirement for a permit, and eight states require some training before you can buy or own a gun.

Example: Kentucky, no blue state, requires you first hit a silhouette target at least 11 out of 20 shots to get a gun permit.

Here, we’re the Wild West. You can buy guns or qualify for permits in minutes, even if you’ve never held a loaded gun before.

I don’t know if gun training would have stopped Allen Ivanov. But it might have.

Somebody doing something rash, as he was, might not first sign up for a two-part, 10-hour course. Even if he had, it may have done nothing to change his mind. But at least then a trained gun instructor would have looked him in the eyes and considered: “Should this guy have a gun?”

Rest of us can’t give up

Of course, it’s possible he could have just stolen a gun, or tried some other weapon. As a family-law attorney who specializes in domestic-violence cases wrote to me: “In the end, if a deranged person like Ivanov is bent on killing his ex because she wouldn’t get back together with him, he is likely going to find a way.”

Probably true. But do we have to make it so easy for him? Easier than we make it to go pheasant hunting?

I can hear the constitutionalists now: “But Danny you libtard, hunting is a privilege. Guns are a right.” My answer is that I support the Second Amendment — the whole thing, which includes the part where it says “well-regulated.” A gun-training requirement is not a gun ban. Being the libtard that I am, it’s even fine with me if the government subsidizes the training so the fee isn’t a burden.

My last column about this prompted hundreds of emails and about 900 online comments. The gun debate can seem to go nowhere, but one letter cut through. It came from the Harborview Medical Center waiting room.

“I read your article just as my son, the lone survivor of the Mukilteo mass shooting, was undergoing thoracic surgery so that his lung won’t repeatedly collapse,” wrote Liz Hartley, the mother of Will Kramer, 18. “Keep the articles for gun control coming, Danny!”

If even the victims of senseless gun violence have hope we’ll someday make progress on this issue, the rest of us can hardly give up.