Diane Feinstein Fears Concealed Carry Reciprocity

This week, in a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy, Senate Diane Feinstein (D – CA) described the reasons for her opposition to two concealed carry reciprocity bills currently in the Senate:

"Imagine that a man who has been convicted of a domestic violence crime against a woman he had been dating seeks — and obtains — a permit to carry a concealed firearm from his state of residence," she wrote. "Under the concealed carry reciprocity bills, he could legally travel across state lines and confront his former girlfriend ..."

Comments and articles decrying the apparent cluelessness of this scenario have sprouted up all over the blogosphere, many people incredulous over Feinsteins idiocy. First, Diane Feinstein is not an idiot.  She is actually very smart, and I am sure that she is familiar with the laws the result in one becoming a prohibited person for firearm possession: she wrote or sponsored many of them.

The above  statement is actually a cunning appeal to a certain class of voter, especially women, voters who are ignorant of gun laws and who will accept the scenario without questioning it.  Feinsteins real goal here is to head-off a California problem: the horror of people people from flyover country carrying concealed weapons in California.  What would happen if (or, more likely, when) people started carrying concealed weapons in California and no Wild West Shootouts happened? Would the people of California demand shall-issue or themselves?  What would happen nationally if California went shall-issue?  Is is just possible that entire debate over concealed carry would be over?

Take a look at two maps that illustrate the types of concealed carry permits systems adopted by the various states.  Here is one from 1992, the year Feinstein was elected to the Senate: 

and here is another from 2011, the last year that the status of a state changed. 

Quite a change, almost a complete reversal! Only Illinois among the fifty states still bars public carry of concealed weapons, and only California, New York, and a handful of Eastern states still have may-issue laws, laws that are often interpreted by authorities to result in de-facto no-issue, especially California, which has only  37465 current concealed weapons licenses. 


Diane Feinstein is well aware of these maps, and what they mean politically for gun control, an issue very near her heart, in which a handgun ban was highly desired:

 "If I could have gotten 51 votes in the Senate of the United States for an outright ban, picking up every one of them . . . Mr. and Mrs. America, turn 'em all in, I would have done it. I could not do that. The votes weren't here." -- 60 Minutes, Feb. 5, 1995.

What would happen to gun control as a political issue if California, one of the last great bastions limiting concealed carry (Illinois and New York being the other two) were to change from yellow to blue on the map?  I think Feinstein fears that gun control would be  truly dead.

HR 822 - Bill Passes House 272 to 154

HR 822, a bill that would mandate nation wide reciprocity of concealed carry permits, passed the House today in a bi-partisan vote.  It now advances to the Senate, where odds of passage are much less certain.  Also note that the margin of passage today in the House is not large enough to override a veto in the event this bill gets to the Presidents desk.

There is still a long way to go, and an uncertain chance of a good outcome.

As Read on Common Gunsense

Blogger gregorycamp had this to say in response to this post on Common Gunsense: 

This is your website, so you have the right to do with it as you choose. That being said, I'd like to see you be honest about your actual purpose here. What you want is to make pronouncements and have your audience sing along in a chorus of agreement. So be it. Just don't expect those of us on the other side to be fooled.

Or to continue to waste our time "debating" Joan Peterson.  I have stopped commenting on her posts because I know she and I will never agree.  The differences in world views and values are too profound for total agreement.

About the only things that Joan Peterson and I agree on, after some reflection on my part, is that all firearms transfers should involve a background check, and that a better job must be done to include mental health records in background checks.  I also think that training should be required for a license to carry a concealed weapon, and that training must include a qualification course of fire. Drug or alcohol use while armed should be prohibited, just as it is when operating automobiles.

As is the case now, one is always responsible for the use of the weapon in public, so everyone who carries a weapon must know when, and when not to use it.  However, a person who uses a weapon in an act of lawful self defense should be immune from civil lawsuits.

Other then that, if you are not a prohibited person, you're good to go.  No waiting periods to pick up a gun.  No purchase limits: 1 handgun per month. No weapon-type bans: police officers and citizens get to carry the same weapons.  No registration of weapons, no ammo restrictions, no micro-stamping, no rosters of supposedly safe weapons, unless the police are subject to the very same limits.

I would also limit the definition of sensitive places, and I would not allow private property owners to prohibit weapon carry if they offer sales of services or products to the public.   If schools are deemed to be sensitive, then that should apply to the school property itself, not to zones surrounding the property.

Guns in Schools: Always a Bad Thing?

Common sense says that guns and schools go together like a match and gasoline: they know nothing good can come from the combination.  Joan Peterson thinks, and has said many times on her blog, that the idea of ordinary armed people stopping a school shooting incident is fantasy:

Who are these people that we would entrust to "protect" our children? How will they be vetted? At least we know that police officers are trained for this stuff and are vetted and hired to do the job of protecting us. That is their primary job when they are on duty. It is not a part-time, as needed, and when they are available.

But it is not fantasy.  It has happened in the past, and it could happen in the future.  How many times have teachers or students, legally armed, intervened in school shootings with beneficial effects? At least four times in the 20th century:

• University of Texas, 1966, armed students and faculty.
• Appalachian School of Law, 2002, armed students.
• Pearl, MI, 1997, armed faculty.
• Parker Middle School, 1997, armed citizen.

Utah allows carry permit holders to carry their concealed weapons on K-12 school property, but when was the last time an active shooter incident happened at a Utah school?  There are many more reports of unarmed teachers, staff, and students stopping active shooters.  To me it only makes common sense to allow teachers with carry permits to carry their concealed weapons while on duty.  We trust these people with our children already, so why not give them the ability to repel an attack?

License To Carry Statistics

This site is new to me, and I found it useful in this post, so I am adding to the Get The Facts section of the blog.  I really wish they had it in a table format, however.

In general, I have found that the hardest thing about blogging about gun-rights issues is finding statistical information about various aspects of firearms ownership and usage.  I have found some interesting things that give some data, and I will be blogging on those soon.

Violence Policy Center Admits Most Gun Control Laws Don't Work

I came across this page on the Violence Policy Center web site and was surpised to read the following:

"Whether at the local, state or federal level, the principal flaw that has plagued legislative efforts has been an almost exclusive focus on over-the-counter sales standards and a mistaken belief that it's possible to separate "good" handguns (those in our hands for self-defense) from "bad" handguns (those in the hands of criminals). Yet as noted earlier, most gun deaths are not crime related. And as the NRA correctly notes, criminals will be the last to obey any gun-control law.

The limitations of such an approach are illustrated by the recently enacted Brady bill. Waiting periods create a cooling-off period between the time a customer buys a gun and the time it may be possessed. In theory, this delay helps stop crimes of passion, and although anecdotal evidence suggests this happens occasionally, most suicides and shootings between friends and family occur with weapons already available.

In theory, background checks increase the chance of identifying those in proscribed categories who attempt to purchase firearms through legal channels. Such laws define the proscribed group as those with a prior felony conviction or deemed mentally unfit, yet such individuals rarely even attempt to buy guns personally from retail outlets.

A second conceptual flaw is the implicit assumption that anyone without a felony record is by definition "law-abiding." Under such systems individuals with arrest records and convictions for serious crimes are able to acquire guns legally because they have never been convicted of a felony. Patrick Purdy, the Stockton schoolyard killer, had a nine-year criminal history replete with weapons violations but could legally purchase a handgun under California law.

Recently, in the wake of the Brady bill's passage, attention has focused on the licensing of handgun owners. Licensing does offer some benefits: The information is useful in tracing weapons; identification of those in proscribed categories attempting to purchase firearms through legal channels is increased; and the application process itself may discourage sales to casual buyers. The limitations of licensing are that such systems are expensive to administer; it would have little effect on most gun violence, such as suicide or shootings between people who know each other; and anyone in a proscribed category desiring a gun could easily find one in the alternative, nonretail marketplace.

And although the most common argument heard in favor of licensing is "We license cars, why not license handguns?" public-health experts note that the licensing of cars had little effect on the death rate associated with autos. It was not until changes were made to the product itself--such as seat belts, air bags and improved structural design--that the number of deaths began to decline."

 Wow.  Let me summarize this:

1. No such thing as a "good" or a "bad" handgun.  Assigning moral values to objects is a mistake.
2. Waiting periods do not perform their intended task.
3. Prohibited persons rarely make gun purchases from retail dealers, so background checks are useless.
4. People with arrest records and violent misdemeanors should be prohibited from purchasing.
5. Licensing schemes will not have a large effect on firearms violence.
6. Only changes to the dangerous product itself can have an effect on the resultant violence.

Points 1, 2, 3, and 5 seem to show that VPC as of 1998, the copyright date of this document, have given up on the staples of gun control: licensing, and other purchase limitations.  Points 4, and 6 seem to telegraph what has happened since that time: more and more misdemeanor violent convictions result in prohibited status of individuals, and we have seen increasing ploys to dictate changes in gun manufacture, such as owner authorized handgun technology, micro-stamping, and ammunition serialization.

We also see the same old trend in the gun control side: the idea that controlling an object will have an effect on the actions of people: gun violence.  They do not seem to understand that if guns disappeared, gun violence would simply be converted into "knife violence", or "fist violence" or "bludgeon violence".

We have more guns, handgun and long guns, in this country than ever, but violent crime has been dropping every year. If VPC's logic was correct, we should be seeing an epidemic of gun violence, but despite the preaching of Joan Peterson, this is not happening.  

What is VPC trying to eliminate now?  Public carry of firearms by law abiding citizens.  They have clumsily telegraphed their intentions, but we need to stay vigilant. I think that the gun-rights community is on the offensive, and the sheer numbers of us will be telling in any election.  If I take the VPC claim that the 160 persons are actually valid carry permit holders convicted of gun crimes, then that means 6,140,646 carry permit holders have not committed any crimes.

That kind of makes the Violence Policy Center look pretty pathetic, doesn't it?