The Lovelle Mixon shooting and killing of four Oakland police officers is being used as a justification to enact a laundry list of new gun control laws by our State and Federal representatives. Proposals include making the expired Federal assault weapons law permanent; placing limits on ammunition sales, requiring registration of “high capacity” magazines, biometric handgun safeties, serial number imprinting on ammunition, and just about every other anti-gun idea that infringes on our right to keep and bear arms.

These representatives and activists think that we are stupid enough to believe that if we just passed more laws, that these kinds of incidents would not happen. Right.

Mr. Mixon was hardly a model, law abiding, citizen. According to Wikipedia: Beginning at age 13, Mixon was arrested multiple times for battery, and by age 20 he began serving a Corcoran state prison sentence following a conviction for assault with a deadly weapon during an armed robbery in San Francisco. After he was paroled, Mixon was in and out of prison. At the time of his assault on the officers, he was living in East Oakland at his grandmother's house and was wanted on a no-bail arrest warrant for violating his current parole conditions. On March 20, 2009, the day before Mixon killed the police officers, Oakland police learned that Mixon was linked by DNA to the February 2009 rape of a 12-year-old girl who was dragged off the street at gunpoint in the East Oakland neighborhood where Mixon's sister lived. Investigators said that he may have committed as many as five other rapes in the same neighborhood during recent months, however no convictions had been secured before Mixon's death and the DNA investigation continues. If Mixon had been arrested for his parole violaton, he would have faced at most six months in prison; if convicted of rape, he faced a life sentence.

Mixon had also been the primary suspect in a previous murder case, however due to lack of evidence he had been charged only with lesser violations: possession of drug paraphernalia, forgery, identity theft, attempted grand theft, and receiving stolen property.

The Oakland shootings took place in California, the state with the most restrictive gun control laws in the country already. Besides the shootings themselves, it was illegal for Mr. Mixon to own or possess any firearm, let alone an AK-47, used in the shooting. AK-47’s have been illegal for ten years already.

So, why on earth do our representatives figure that more laws would prevent future occurrences of these types? New laws won’t do a single thing except to give the criminals even more leverage over law abiding citizens’ right to protect themselves. How Mixon got the guns used in the shootings or whether he used high capacity magazines has not been disclosed.

The answer is that this tragedy is being exploited by anti-gun zealots to advance an ideological agenda, regardless of the facts. Only two weeks ago, there was a Columbine-like shooting in Germany, which has some of the strictest gun control regulations in the world. The fact is that across the country, and the world, there is no correlation between the existence of strict firearms regulations and a lower incidence of gun-related crimes.