GUNS/BARMS

[Gmenfan]

My Turn: ‘Monitor’ gets it wrong on gun control

http://mobile.concordmonitor.com/home/13879006-108/my-turn-monitor-gets-it-wrong-on-gun-control

Anti-gun liberals are seldom persuaded by logic. So it’s hard to believe that responding to the Oct. 3 Monitor editorial is not a waste of time. But gun owners take offense to the Monitor’s childish name-calling, branding the Second Amendment community as engaging in “absolutism” – and brandishing the old “fire in a crowded theater” trope.

First of all, the “spate of mass shootings” the Monitor worries about is a myth. Not only are they on the decline, one is more likely to die by fire, bicycles or falls. And many of the states that have witnessed these “mass shootings” are places like Connecticut, California, Illinois and New York. These states had the gun bans, magazine bans and background checks that the Monitor craves. And that was, tragically, not enough.

On the point of concealed carry permits, these states started with the proposition that Americans needed to get the government’s permission to carry a firearm, and the end-result was that the government stopped giving its permission.

Vermont, on the other hand – which is not that unlike New Hampshire – doesn’t require any permit to carry a firearm. And how many people, as a result, would feel less safe in any place in Vermont than they would in Watts, Chicago, New York or Hartford?

As a result, Gun Owners of America will make it a chief priority in New Hampshire in 2015 to adopt a New Hampshire “constitutional carry” statute similar to Vermont’s, and to reject the anti-gun hysteria of states like New York and California.

When you think about it, gun control is one of the few areas where there is an almost psychotic will to adopt the policies of failure. It is like trying to crib test answers from the class dummy.

In fact, the one thing that all rabidly anti-gun places like Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C., have in common is that they all have high murder rates.

Now, with respect to the accusation that the Second Amendment community consists of “absolutists” – would that that were true.

Since 1968, Congress has passed one anti-gun bill after another – moving from the Gun Control Act, to the ban on plastic guns, to the ban on new automatics, to the ban on “armor piercing bullets,” to the ban on semi-automatics and the Brady Law, to the veterans gun ban and bans in school zones.

In most cases, the bogeyman NRA supported these bills. And in all cases, the restrictions on freedom proved to be ineffectual political exercises that, in retrospect, were nothing but platforms to the next gun control demands.

“No one is going to take away guns or deny permits to law-abiding citizens,” says the Monitor. But that’s exactly what’s happening in those parts of the country where gun owners failed to resist the creeping incursion of the anti-gun lobby. No one has any doubt that New Hampshire Democrats are planning for the day when New Hampshire is sufficiently “blue” to join them.

(Michael E. Hammond is the legislative counsel for Gun Owners of America. He lives in Dunbarton.)