Uneventful, As Usual
By Mitch Berg
Peter Bronson of the Cincinnati Enquirer took the Ohio concealed carry class. And he notices something I’ve seen from at least the few journalists who’ve bothered to learn the topic:
From what I can tell, legal concealed carry is nothing like the anti-gun crowd made it sound when Kentucky and Ohio passed laws in 1999 and 2004. There are no cowboys. No wild shootouts. No blood in the gutters, as gun-banners predicted. Just law-abiding adults who want to exercise their Second Amendment right to self-defense.
And this one – a lesson that’d seem to have eluded most of Minnesota’s remaining concealed carry opponents:
If every gun owner took a class like this, we’d all be safer. But meth-heads, crack junkies and street muggers don’t take classes. They don’t get permits or certificates like the one Lengle gave me Sunday. They just grab a “nine” and use it against defenseless victims.
(Via Rosenberg)
February 18th, 2008 at 9:34 am
EXACTLY. The anti-2nd Amendment rights crowd kept talking about how we’d have shootouts in public places (and I don’t mean just along 35W or outside the Target Center) when CC passed.
I’ve heard liberals say that conceal-carry advocates just want to blast people away.
February 18th, 2008 at 9:49 am
I think there’s a natural tendency for people not familiar with something to confuse their idle fantasies with what others really do. Shows up a whole lot among non-gunowners when talking about what they’d do — remember the Star Tribune’s “leaping handguns”?
February 18th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I’ve got no problem with taking classes. I just prefer them to be private classes. That way nobody is keeping track. Hopefully.
“Any kind of gun registration, including a list of State issued Concealed Carry Permits, tells the State who has guns and the ability and willingness to use them. Anyone who is on any kind of registration list can be catagorized as a “useful idiot”.”
February 18th, 2008 at 9:09 pm
Well, given that Paymar is about to put a statewide gun registration bill in, things are about to get, well, interesting.
February 18th, 2008 at 11:59 pm
“Any kind of gun registration, including a list of State issued Concealed Carry Permits, tells the State who has guns and the ability and willingness to use them. Anyone who is on any kind of registration list can be catagorized as a “useful idiot”.”
All the more reason to not buy anything from a licensed dealer but only from private sales. With a good eye you can get an excellent value in a used firearm anyway. I view it as analogous to cars, but with the added bonus of not being tracked by the Feds. As Joel can tell you, there have been issues with BATF obeying the laws about destroying the evidence of those background checks.
February 20th, 2008 at 11:04 am
Little late to this, (and off the topic) but…
Peter Bronson was once the editorial page editor for the Gannett owned Cincinnati Enquirer. As editorial pages go the Enquirer editorial page is (was) center right when he was there (before he became a columnist). I heard Bronson speak on a book tour and he said that if all the conservative editorial page editors had a convention it wouldn’t take more than a phone booth to hold it in. He has some great stories about going to conferences and conventions with other editorial page folks and how truly far to the fringe left many of them are. I thought he was exaggerating until I moved here and experienced Jim Boyd and his Strib cronies.
February 20th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
I’m with Hewitt (and Mitch, and many others) on that issue. I think it’s just fine (or, at worst, unavoidable) that folks, including journalists, have biases and political orientations. I just think it’s dishonest for them to keep them secret, and even more so to pretend to not have any.