Pathetic...

Our state suffered the tragic loss of a National Park Ranger in Mt. Rainier National Park on Sunday. A crazed, PTSD suffering former soldier gunned down the ranger when she made an attempt to stop him in the park. She was stopping him because he had already blown through a checkpoint down the road. It turns out that he was fleeing the scene of a shooting in which he had been involved earlier that morning.

After killing Margaret Anderson, he fired on other park rangers who came to the scene, then fled into the snowy woods on foot...

He was found the next day, face down in a creek, dead by drowning and hypothermia.

All this is very tragic...especially for the husband and 2 pre-school daughters of Ranger Anderson. I can't help feeling it is a tragedy as well for the family of the gunman...what a heartache.

What is pathetic is that, even before the gunman was found, there were those who were exclaiming that if the government had passed a proposed ban on handguns in national parks this would not have happened...

I can't think of any way that a handgun ban would have prevented this tragedy...

Would the PTSD suffering soldier think: "I can't hide in the national park because there is a handgun ban there..."

Would he have surrendered his weapon at the check point, or turned around to leave when informed that it was illegal to carry in the park? (Uh -- he BLEW THROUGH the check point as it was...)

Isn't this almost exactly the kind of scenario that opponents of a ban explain would happen NO MATTER WHAT RULES THERE ARE FOR CARRYING GUNS?  It is true that guns don't kill people; people kill people. And when you remove the right to bear arms, you just might be disarming the hero who will come to your aid when someone who is out of their mind pulls a weapon on you...

Really -- my biggest problem with the rationalization that a gun ban would have prevented this tragedy is not that it impinges on my right to bear arms. It's that the reasoning used is so flawed, and so STUPID. Some people are so committed to their agenda that they can't even see when they are being fools...and THAT is pathetic.