A Baltimore Sun columnist wrote in a Thursday op-ed that citizens who legally own firearms are more frightening than the criminals who use the weapons on the rough streets of her hometown. Tricia Bishop, deputy editorial page editor for the Baltimore paper, explained how billboards advertisements for guns and everyday Americans carrying them around made her sick.
She says this because she believes as a middle-class white woman, she’s shielded from her city’s criminal element but, in her opinion, she’s not protected from her neighbors’ legally-purchased weapons.
“I have the luxury of being white and middle class in a largely segregated city that reserves most of its shootings for poor, black neighborhoods overtaken by ‘the game,’” she wrote. “But I don’t know where the legal gun owners are or how to ensure that their children, no matter how well versed in respecting firearms, won’t one day introduce that weapon to my daughter.”
With this grave threat lying within her neighborhood, Bishop concludes President Obama’s recent executive order is not enough and she is entitled to have a gun registry list to protect her kids. She argues this needed in the same way the country has a sex offender registry list, which strongly implies legal firearm owners are as much a threat to children as pedophiles are.