Mayor: gun background checks make sense

MOBILE, Ala. (WALA) - Mobile Mayor Sam Jones said gun control was a big topic of discussion at a mayor’s conference he attended in Washington, D.C.

Jones said there were a number of people speaking at the conference on the issue.

The mayor said, "What they wanted to do, more than anything else, they don't want to take anybody's rights to bear arms or to have a gun, but they do want to make sure that they had background checks."

Jones said most of the mayors think background checks make sense.

"Because when you do that, you wind up, in some cases, finding people who have mental illnesses. You find people who are felons, all that becomes a part of that," he said.

Another issue discussed not only by the mayors, but also by Vice President Joe Biden at a roundtable discussion in Virginia, is ammunition.

Biden said, "I'm much less concerned, quite frankly, with what you'd call an 'assault weapon' than I am with magazines, and the number of rounds that can be held in a magazine."

Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein unveiled a beefed up assault weapons ban proposal to outlaw the manufacture and sale of 157 types of semi automatic weapons, and magazines containing more than ten rounds.

Jones said, "I think in the administration's proposal which they talked about in Washington, they talked about actually limiting the size of magazines that people can buy for certain types of weapons, some of them are assault weapons.

The mayor of Los Angeles pointed out that even duck hunters limit the number of shells you can have when you hunt ducks, so he thinks limiting magazines is not a big issue.