{"id":41861,"date":"2014-02-20T12:00:49","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T18:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41861"},"modified":"2014-02-18T19:32:36","modified_gmt":"2014-02-19T01:32:36","slug":"the-new-normal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=41861","title":{"rendered":"The New Normal"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first became a Second Amendment activist in the eighties.\u00a0 It started out as an intellectual exercise – during my KSTP show from 1986-1987, it was mainly a libertarian though exercise.\u00a0 It became much more personal in 1988, when I thwarted a break-in in my Saint Paul duplex <\/a>with a .22 caliber handgun.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Most of the rest of the country, including Minnesota,\u00a0was “may-issue”, better described as “arbitrary issue”, where getting a permit usually required some sort of social or poltical connection.\u00a0 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And for over a third of the country, it was impossible to get a carry permit at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And the burgeoning of applied Second Amendment rights since then has been one of the epic grassroots political victories in American history<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

David Kopel, writing at Volokh, charted the progress.\u00a0 As of today, 2\/3 of the American people live in shall-issue states, and non-issue states have dwindled – technically – to zero.\u00a0 Arbitrary issue is now about 14%.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And even that doesn’t fully show the magnitude of the swing:<\/p>\n

Moreover, some parts of the Yellow \u201cmay issue\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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]\u00a0states. (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\u2019s three counties, permit issuance is often approximately what a Green [Shall Issue]\u00a0state would do.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first became a Second Amendment activist in the eighties.\u00a0 It started out as an intellectual exercise – during my KSTP show from 1986-1987, it was mainly a libertarian though exercise.\u00a0 It became much more personal in 1988, when I thwarted a break-in in my Saint Paul duplex with a .22 caliber handgun.\u00a0 At the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[269,30,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41861","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grass-roots","category-liberty","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41861","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41861"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41861\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41868,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41861\/revisions\/41868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41861"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41861"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41861"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}