Joe Huffman who blogs at The View from North Central Idaho and who is the man behind Boomershoot has made a most sensible suggestion given the events yesterday in Alexandria.

I would like to suggest that congress drop baseball as the annual sport competition between Democrats and Republicans. If this had been practice for a three-gun match or even a IPDA, USPSA, or steel match fewer innocent people would have been injured.

He’s correct, of course. If any of these members of Congress had been armed with even a pistol, it would have brought more force to bear on the shooter and ended things sooner.

Where I see problems arising is trying to get the sides to agree on what rifles are OK to use, how large a magazine is allowed, etc. For example, given how many Democrats are pushing for restrictions on standard capacity magazines, would there be an agreement that only California-compliant 10 round magazines could be used?

One way to get around would be to make it a NSSF Rimfire Challenge sort of event. Rimfire means no arguments on whether it is a “high powered assault rifle” or merely a rifle firing an intermediate cartridge with ugly cosmetics. It would by definition not be “high powered”. Moreover, the rulebook allows magazines to be restricted to 10-round capacity so that eliminates that argument. Finally, since from what I can tell, all the targets are steel plates of one non-human form or another, no one could bring “you’re a racist” accusations by saying that black human silhouette targets actually represent African-Americans.

Do I think congressional Democrats and Republicans will make the switch from baseball to action shooting? No but it is fun to speculate about it.