[Vision2020] Craziness from Georgia in the Gun Debate

[Art Deco]

Legislator makes dubious claim on guns By Walter C.
Jones<http://onlineathens.com/authors/walter-c-jones>Morris
News Service – published Monday, February 11, 2013

ATLANTA – The national debate about gun control triggered by the mass
shooting in a Connecticut elementary school took a new dimension Monday
when a Georgia legislator announced that hammers and frying pans were
involved in more murders than guns.

Sen. Bill Jackson, R-Augusta, addressed his colleagues during discussion of
a mental-health bill that the sponsor said would do more to prevent mass
shootings than gun control. Jackson picked up on that theme.

“More murders were committed last year with hammers than with shotguns,
rifles or AK-47s,” he said.

He also mentioned a murder he read about where the victim was bludgeoned
with a frying pan.

After the Senate passed the bill with his support, he said he didn’t recall
where he read the statistic about the use of implements other than guns in
murders.

“It might have even been twice as many,” he told a reporter. “I’ll try and
come up with it.”

The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports for 2011 include a category for weapons
other than knives or guns used in murders, but nowhere in the
state-by-state listing of murder weapons do “other weapons” come close to
guns.

Jackson’s point, he said, was that no one is worried about regulating
hammers and frying pans.

“If they’re going to take the guns, let’s take the frying pans and the
hammers,” he said. “It’s crazy. That frying pan wasn’t going to go and get
up out of the kitchen and kill nobody, now, until that varmint got a hold
of it.”

His colleague from a neighboring district, Democrat Hardie Davis, joked,
“Thank goodness it wasn’t my wife.”

Jackson endured some friendly ribbing from other senators at a committee
meeting later in the day. But his folksiness is generally appreciated.

Friday, he sang a gospel hymn to the whole Senate at the urging of Lt. Gov.
Casey Cagle.

Davis, a minister in Augusta, was one of two senators who opposed the bill
during debate. As a gun owner with a family member who struggled with
mental illness, he said he was offended at the notion of an association
between mental illness and murder.

“To talk about this in the context of gun legislation is unfair to those of
us who are gun carriers,” he said.

The bill, Senate Bill 65, authorizes licensed counselors to order
involuntary commitment to a hospital for 72 hours in cases where a person
is threatening to harm himself or others. It now goes to the House for
consideration.
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