Never has Senator Dianne Feinstein been so candid about the emotional baggage behind her decades-long war on American gun owners. This recent Los Angeles Times article and Reason.com blog piece give us some insights into the apparently ongoing psychological turmoil triggered by the shooting years ago of her San Francisco political colleagues.
Quoted in the L.A. Times article, Feinstein flings her emotions out before the Senate Judiciary Committee and the nation as if she were on Oprah:
“I cannot get out of my mind trying to find a pulse in someone and putting fingers in a bullet hole,” she told colleagues [on the Committee], referring to finding fellow San Francisco Supervisor Harvey Milk’s body in City Hall in 1978 after he and Mayor George Moscone were fatally shot by Dan White, a former supervisor.
Since the 1978 shooting Feinstein has been obsessed with making American gun owners pay. While still mayor of San Francisco she pushed through a clearly illegal city ban on handguns. She knew from the outset that state law ruled out such a ban, and it was eventually overturned after gun owners were forced to take her to court. Later in the U.S. Senate she barely was able to get passed the first “assault weapon” ban, a miserable failure that sunset in 2004 and hasn’t been revived. She put innocent people at risk for arrest and prosecution, and she wasted millions of dollars and years in litigation. But Feinstein didn’t care then and she doesn’t care now.
Unfortunately, there’s a long tradition of politicians making careers of chasing their personal demons. Sarah Brady’s Brady Campaign (then known as Handgun Control, Inc.) became the face of gun ban advocacy in the 1990s after her husband was gravely injured in an attempted assassination of President Reagan. New York Congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy has been obsessed with pushing ever more gun control laws since her husband was murdered in the 1993 Long Island Rail Road mass shooting. And now Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is the latest celebrity shooting victim advocate of more gun control. Her husband has even claimed, by marriage, the liberal celebrity’s exemption from gun laws by buying his very own AR-15.
For every Feinstein, Giffords, and Brady there are innumerable people whose lives have been saved because they or someone close to them had a gun. And they are the people who will suffer the consequences of the legislative malpractice that Reason’s Jacob Sullum calls “I Feel, Therefore I Legislate.”
It’s time for Senator Feinstein to stop warring against American gun owners under the delusion that she is somehow righting the wrongs of the past. We are not the enemy. Senator Feinstein should instead seek psychological counseling to address her unresolved grief and anger.
—Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.