AP Photo/Elaine Thompson

The state of Rhode Island is one that a lot of us don’t often about. After all, it’s tiny. Its impact on us, as a national whole, is fairly small despite its long history.

But now the state legislature is considering some bills that will have a significant impact on residents of that state.

As state lawmakers take up a slew of gun-related bills, supporters on both sides of the issue descended upon the State House to make their voices heard.

Among the several bills that the House Judiciary Committee will look at is a measure that would raise the legal age for purchasing a gun from 18 to 21.

The Committee is also hearing testimony on a bill that would prohibit the sale and possession of a feeding device holding more than 10 rounds and bans on assault rifles and 3D-printed guns.

…

“It’s not a complete ban on any type of assault weapon because people who already own them will be grandfathered in,” David Leach of Providence said. “So it just reduces the number and access of what essentially is a dangerous item.”

So, if you like your firearm, you can keep your gun?

That’s nice of him.

Second Amendment supporters are going to fight this, as they should. Grandfather clauses don’t make anti-gun legislation somehow acceptable. It’s the lovely parting gift you get in hopes you’ll leave the game show stage quietly.

It’s not a win in any way, shape, or form.

However, if you want to talk about dangerous items, let’s talk about dangerous items. For example, more than 600,000 people will die of cancer each year, an excruciating death by anyone’s estimation. Another 1.25 million people die every year in car crashes.  Lord only knows how many hundreds of thousands, if not millions, die from obesity each year.

All of this dwarfs the number of firearm fatalities by orders of magnitude. More people die in car crashes each day than are killed with firearms on an annual basis.

Let’s not get too wound up over the danger presented by firearms in the hands of law-abiding citizens.

Especially since we know that criminals–the people who represent a threat to the population–don’t buy their guns legally. New gun laws are highly unlikely to present any hurdle for them.

Instead, they’ll only impact the law-abiding citizen who will now be denied the ability to purchase these guns, guns which are good self-defense firearms, while doing nothing to stem the flow of black market guns to criminal hands. That’s the real crime in this whole mess.

That doesn’t even touch on the stupidity of magazine limits which have managed to fail everywhere they’ve been used, or the insanity of banning something people can do in their garage without permission in the first place.

These are the favorite causes of the anti-gunners.

In fact, they’re such favorites that it’s impossible to take the public safety concerns they supposedly address seriously. After all, the same problems don’t exist in each state, yet these are still presented as solutions everywhere. It’s an agenda, not a solution. That’s all it’s ever been.