Slow Facts On HR 822

I met Rob Morse on the last day of the recent Gun Rights Policy Conference. It turns out he was a fellow gun blogger and had a blog named Slow Facts. We spent a few hours in Chicago O'Hare chatting while waiting for our respective flights home, me to North Carolina and Rob to Southern California.

Rob is an engineer by training and he applies that same clarity of thought to piercing the gun prohibitionists' arguments against national reciprocity for concealed carry in this article.

Defenders of the existing feudal licensing scheme claim that their state has special needs. (Yes, there are a few “special needs” states in these United States. They have been taking the short bus for years now.) So what! Of course each state tests its drivers in slightly different ways to obtain a license. Some towns allow right turns at a red traffic light, and others don’t. We now post traffic signs so the regulations are explicit and not a matter of local knowledge. Gun laws also differ slightly from state to state, and most of the differences are similarly arbitrary.

It is as if California didn’t allow you to cross the border in your pickup truck because your truck is not on their list of approved vehicles. At the border they say, “In our state, we only let certain people drive that kind of truck. Now why would you be needing one?”

Don’t you recognize the same old political excuses?

• “People will be dying all over the place if we let you drive a truck like that in our state.
• “We have a long tradition of truck control, and it has served us well.
• “Only criminals drive that kind of truck and we won’t stand for it here.
• “Strangers simply don’t understand our system of truck regulation, and we need to keep foreign trucks out of their hands for their own protection.
• “You wouldn’t want one of our children to get their hands on a truck like this, now would you?
• “Our local government knows its citizens and determines the trucks that best serve their needs.”

Rob makes a very perceptive argument when he says that one of the major reasons some politicians oppose national reciprocity is that visitors will make the locals look bad by comparison. In other words, when the people of California or New York or New Jersey see visitors carrying concealed, legally and safely, they will begin to wonder why the heck they don't have the same rights as the visitors.

Read the whole post as it does an excellent job is demolishing the arguments of Mayor Bloomberg and his Illegal Mayors with their Our Lives, Our Laws campaign.