Last week a good friend of mine who lives in Washington State was almost killed - not by a teenager with a gun, but by a teenager with a car...and a cellphone. A 16 year old girl ran a stop sign and slammed into the driver's side door of my friend's car. The teenager was talking on her cell phone. My friend is still in the hospital with multiple fractures and internal organ damage.

And this teenage girl is not an anomaly - while 16 and 17 year-olds represent only 11% of the driving population, they are involved in an astonishing 40% of all fatal crashes.

Yet, in spite of this fact, and in spite of estimates that at least 4000 lives would likely be saved by simply raising the driving age to 18, such measures never even make it out of committee. And while Washington State does have a "no-talking-on-a-cell-phone-while-driving" law, there is little real enforcement, and you certainly don't hear cries for banning them.

Note also, that nobody asked "where she got the cell-phone" or "what kind of car" she was driving. Yet, had the very same teenage girl been recklessly handling a gun when she injured my friend, oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth that would have ensued. And none of the outrage would have been directed toward the girl - oh, no. Suddenly, "where she got the gun" would be a major focus.

But isn't "gun control" a dead issue? Didn't Democrats learn their lesson when they lost numerous races in the past dozen years over the "gun" issue? Well, not exactly. Just when you thought the dinosaur known as "gun control" was extinct, anti-gun rumblings are starting up again, this time from those in the incoming Obama administration.

They're talking about resurrecting the failed "assault weapons" ban (and yes, it was a failure - even supporters now admit it had NO impact on violent crime at any level). But, hey, what chance does reason and logic have against images of "scary looking guns."

They are also proposing absurdly complex technical requirements for firearms  - "for the children" of course. Things like magic fingerprint readers and other nonsense that borders on science-fiction, if not outright fantasy. At least to anyone who knows a thing about firearms.

Note that Law Enforcement organizations have already stated clearly that they will NOT accept such firearms for duty use - they know that such needlessly complex mechanisms could easily cost officers their lives. So police will likely be exempt from such requirements. YOUR life, however, will not be the concern of gun control advocates.

Now, this should not even be a liberal vs. conservative issue: I have very liberal friends who own guns. I have students in my carry permit classes who are die-hard liberals. So, reason SHOULD prevail.

But it doesn't.

No matter how persistent the failure of gun control, the answer is always "more gun control." Whether violent crime goes up, down, or stays the same, the drumbeat for more restrictive laws continues.

Predictably, these latest doomed-to-fail policies will be dressed up in the usual emotional rhetoric about "keeping guns out of the wrong hands" but the result will be the same - thugs, rapists, robbers, drug dealers and murderers WILL continue to obtain firearms. We already know this to be true.

Right here in Minnesota, the Force Science Research Institute at Mankato State recently completed a 5-year study with the FBI on the most violent and dangerous offenders of all: 17 - 25 year old, mostly inner city males, who get in shoot-outs with Police Officers. They looked at 800 incidents and zeroed in on 40 cases for in-depth study. Among their findings:

Unlike the high tech hardware carried by thugs on TV shows, the "gun of choice" of these real-life killers is based on whatever is "cheap" and "available" - almost half of them chose inexpensive revolvers.

Where do they get their guns? Contrary to the myth of the "gun show loophole" not a single firearm was bought at a gun show - NOT ONE. One gun was bought legally - every one of the others was stolen, or bought stolen on the street.

When asked "Has any law designed to prevent your owning firearms - federal, state, or local - been effective?" the most frequent answer, according to the study team was "they just laughed out loud at us, and told us 'you must be kidding'" (or something a bit more "colorful").

And how old were these perpetrators when they first carried a gun? Shockingly, they were only 9 to 12 years of age. By age 17, they were carrying a gun "just about every day." So much for laws that decree age restrictions and background checks. Worse, many of these "street combat veterans" had been in multiple gun fights prior to shooting it out with police. One in ten had been wounded, some more than once!

But perhaps the most disturbing finding was the ruthlessness of today's young killers. To quote the report: "Davis said the study team did not realize how cold blooded the younger generation of offender is. They have been exposed to killing after killing, they fully expect to get killed and they don't hesitate to shoot anybody, including a police officer. They can go from riding down the street saying what a beautiful day it is to killing in the next instant."

[Note: for a truly eye-opening look at today's inner city youth, be sure to see the History Channel series "Gangland" - it will help you understand the utter foolishness of gun control efforts.]

Sadly, no matter what the reality on today's streets, whether idiot teenage drivers who talk and text message while driving, or the vicious teenage killers who roam our cities, reason continues to take a "back seat" to emotional hysteria.

And emotion invariably leads to bad policy.