The New Normal

I first became a Second Amendment activist in the eighties.  It started out as an intellectual exercise – during my KSTP show from 1986-1987, it was mainly a libertarian though exercise.  It became much more personal in 1988, when I thwarted a break-in in my Saint Paul duplex with a .22 caliber handgun. 

At the time, there were eight “shall issue” states – states where the government was obliged to give carry permits to demonstrably law-abiding citizens who applied.  Most of the rest of the country, including Minnesota, was “may-issue”, better described as “arbitrary issue”, where getting a permit usually required some sort of social or poltical connection.  New York City was famous for denying permits to commoners but issued them liberally to celebrities and tycoons; the police chief in Bloomington Minnesota issued exactly one permit to a woman – his wife. 

And for over a third of the country, it was impossible to get a carry permit at all. 

And the burgeoning of applied Second Amendment rights since then has been one of the epic grassroots political victories in American history

David Kopel, writing at Volokh, charted the progress.  As of today, 2/3 of the American people live in shall-issue states, and non-issue states have dwindled – technically – to zero.  Arbitrary issue is now about 14%. 

And even that doesn’t fully show the magnitude of the swing:

Moreover, some parts of the Yellow “may issue” states are already issuing permits as if they were Green [Shall Issue]. In New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Delaware, permits are issued by local authorities, and in some jurisdictions, local authorities issue in a manner consistent with respect for the right to bear arms. Permits are rarely issued in Maryland, and are extremely rare in New Jersey.

The six hold-out states are increasingly isolated. Not counting tiny Rhode Island and Delaware, the four larger hold-out states each are all bordered mainly by Green [Shall Issue] states. (Mass. by upper New England and Connecticut; NY by Penn., Vt., and Conn.; NJ by Penn.; Maryland by Penn., Vir., and WV). It should also be noted that in two of Delaware’s three counties, permit issuance is often approximately what a Green [Shall Issue] state would do.

Big Liberalism posits itself as a battle between the little guy – “the 99%” in their self-serving lore – against the cigar-chomping “Monopoly Millionaire” tycoon caricature.  But the gun issue has shown the American political dichotomy as it really is; the plebeians are the majority of Real Americans who trust each other with civil liberty, versus a self-appointed patrician “elite” who believe that government (which disproportionally represents them) should have an unquestioned monopoly on force.

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