Enforcing gun control laws

United States President Barack Obama’s speech concerning last week’s movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado bears watching especially here in the country where the crackdown on loose firearms has mostly failed, simply because most of our own police don’t have their own service firearms to begin with.

“A lot of gun owners would agree that AK-47s belong in the hands of soldiers, not in the hands of criminals — that they belong on the battlefield of war, not on the streets of our cities,” Obama said in a speech to the National Urban League.

The US leader went further, saying that he believes that the majority of American gun owners would agree that everything possible should be done to prevent criminals and fugitives from purchasing weapons.

That means checking someone’s criminal record and restricting access to guns and ammunition to the public to prevent them from landing in the hands of the mentally unbalanced and trigger-happy extremists.

“These steps shouldn’t be controversial. They should be common sense,” Obama said. While the US military and police aren’t found wanting in so far as firearms are concerned, the same cannot be said of their counterparts here in the country, who were promised by President Benigno Aquino III that they would be issued their own firearms before the end of the year.

In Cebu and the rest of Central Visayas, about 40,000 of the region’s 8,000 police personnel don’t have their own service firearms. Among them was a female police officer who shot down a robber using her own personal gun.

And wasn’t Danao City known for its thriving “paltik” guns industry which provides employment to locals and weapons to both the criminal elements, law-abiding citizens wanting to protect themselves and even the police?

Yet the common concern is to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and in the holsters of police and military who are charged with serving and protecting the public and defending the country from rebels and dissidents out to topple our constitutionally elected governnment.

The Aurora, Colorado massacre may or may not happen in our country, let alone Cebu but it is no stranger to violence committed either by zealous militants or by crazies out to make a fast buck or sow violence to gratify their own twisted egos.

The Robinsons Fuente branch, formerly known as Robinsons Place, was the site of last year’s shootout between robbers and police and it happened on a morning when everyone was busy with their own plans with no expectation that a crime was about to happen in their midst.

While it is only to be expected for government to provide firearms to the country’s protectors, it should at the same time enforce existing laws on gun control to make it difficult, if not impossible for the wrong people to have them.

By that we also mean public officials who justify maintaining their own retinue of heavily-armed bodyguards with the excuse that they are vulnerable to attack from their political (and imagined) enemies.

It’s time we use some common sense in enforcing our gun control laws.