Columbus, GA City Council Wants Changes to State’s Gun Laws

The city in Georgia I’ve probably spent the most time in besides my hometown is Columbus, Georgia, home of Fort Benning. The reason I’ve spent time there is that most of my family on my father’s side lives in and around there. I love driving through, though, and going past the Abrams tanks as I go down the highway.

So imagine my surprise when, as I looked through gun-related stories on my news feed, Columbus popped up. 

It seems the city council there is preparing its legislative agenda for the upcoming session in Atlanta, and one of the things they want is gun control.

Tucker also sponsored a resolution asking for the Georgia Code to be amended to prohibit weapons inside city-owned recreation centers. This comes in the wake of the Aug. 29 fatal shooting at Shirley B. Winston Recreation Center. 

“Right now, you can’t charge somebody with having a weapon,” Tucker told the Ledger-Enquirer. “You can charge them if it’s a weapon that’s been altered or modified. But you can have a .22., .48 or 9mm gun, and it’s legal. (This is) just putting safety measures in place to help our employees and our patrons.” 

The council unanimously approved the resolution with an amendment clarifying that the weapons ban would apply to only the buildings and not the surrounding grounds and parks.

That particular shooting was a case of someone walking into a city rec center, trying to take someone else’s belongings, and shooting them when they objected to being robbed, from what I saw in the linked story. It seems to me that no one had any reason to suspect a shooting was possible until the moment the bad guy started shooting.

In other words, someone committed a crime, then another crime, and this city council seems to think that by lumping another crime on top of those will somehow make everything better? If he was willing to commit theft and murder, why would he balk at a gun charge?

I get the thinking here. The idea is that if it’s illegal, they can arrest someone just because they have a gun.

The problem is, again, I’m not seeing anything that says they saw this gun before the shooting. I don’t see anything that would suggest such a measure would do anything at all to stop the next shooting like this.

But what it can do, though, is make it so that other people at recreation centers in the state of Georgia are unable to defend themselves from people who don’t care about the law.

If you’re wondering why a military town is pushing for something like this, just keep in mind that military personnel are counted in the census as being residents of that city, but most vote in their home states via absentee ballots. So, they’re not voting in Columbus elections, which means they’re also have to deal with gun-grabbing officials, too, but can’t do anything about them.

It’s not enough that they want to do this in Columbus, but they want this at the state level. I’ll give them credit for recognizing preemption is a thing–Savannah could learn a thing or two here–but that doesn’t make me feel a whole lot better.

Luckily, there’s no evidence of any political will to expand the list of gun-free zones in the state of Georgia.

Thankfully.

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