A runaway Amtrak of anti-gun hysteria

     Oleg Volk photo

Last week, the U.S. Senate approved an amendment to a transportation and housing bill that would require Amtrak to once again permit passengers to transport unloaded firearms in their checked baggage, or lose its $1.6 billion annual federal funding.  Before the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and the subsequent Madrid train bombing, transporting locked, unloaded firearms in one's checked baggage on Amtrak was uncontroversial.  It was only after guns were not used to kill thousands of people in those two atrocities that the current total ban of firearms was put in place.

While such a measure, if passed (the House version of the bill does not have the provision, so there is no guarantee that the final version of the bill will include it), would certainly be a gain for gun rights, it can hardly be considered a major triumph for the Second Amendment.  Not only would the gun have to be in one's checked baggage, unavailable for self-defense, the passenger would have to declare the firearm when he checked his baggage, it would have to be unloaded, and be kept in a locked, rigid container--not exactly "shall not be infringed" material. 

Even the Brady Campaign's Paul Helmke is not particularly concerned.

Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said he "doesn't have problems with people transporting guns on trains so long as steps are taken to make sure they're secured and properly stowed."

In that, though, he parts ways with some of his anti-gun extremist comrades.

For some of the truly committed anti-gun hardliners, even this modest concession to rights is an outrage.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez, Representative Carolyn McCarthy, Philadelphia Mayor Michael A. Nutter, Trenton Mayor Douglas H. Palmer, Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy and Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly today stood together in Penn Station to urge the House of Representatives to reject legislation that would allow Amtrak train passengers to travel with guns in checked luggage.

Now that's a collection of forcible citizen disarmament extremists.  The "reasoning" (to put it generously), as articulated by New York City's Mayor Bloomberg:

 “If anyone in Congress thinks the threat of terrorist attacks on trains have gone away, they are mistaken,” the mayor said.

Bloomberg said that the Amtrak security was already pretty lax, and if the new bill passes, there wouldn’t be anything keeping someone from carrying multiple assault weapons in their baggage.

If security on trains is "already pretty lax," what is to stop aspiring terrorists from bringing weapons onboard right now?  Why, for that matter, would they want to carry them in their checked baggage, where they cannot be used?

Falling back on the standard technique for dismissing Constitutional justification for making gun policy less draconian, Bloomberg hopes to take the concept of rights out of the discussion.

“It has nothing to do with the second amendment and the right to bear arms, but everything to do with keeping passengers safe.”

That's the easy way to trample rights--just claim, without explanation, that "it has nothing to do with" the rights in question.

Perhaps Bloomberg's (and U.S. Representative "What's a barrel shroud" McCarthy's, and NYC Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly's) objection to guns locked up on trains is a New York thing--a New York Times editorial is positively incandescent with indignation, with the hysterical rhetoric starting before one gets past the title: "The Senate Brandishes a Gun at Amtrak."  The quality of the commentary goes, amazingly, downhill from there.

The Brady Campaign denies being anti-gun, and to their (small amount of) credit, are refraining from joining in the howls of outrage from those who do not even bother to deny their hatred of privately owned firearms.  Perhaps they would like to burnish their "not anti-gun" credentials, with an effort to convince Mayor Bloomberg and friends that terrorists have nothing to gain from this modest measure.  I won't hold my breath.