Politics: Have Gun, Will Travel
Norquist, Grover G.
POLITICS by Grover G. Norquist Have Gun, Will Travel S mart Democrats have always feared the issue of gun control. Like the Sirens that lured Greek sailors onto fatal reefs, gun control is the...
...Bill Graves vetoed the bill, reportedly under pressure from his wife...
...61 to 39...
...Barbara Boxer (D-Calif...
...Senate rejected a trigger-lock law proposed by Sen...
...Executive director of the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action, Metaksa has compiled anecdotes of women using guns to defend themselves against criminals...
...In the political arena, Tanya Metaksa's 1997 book Safe, Not Sony (HarperCollins, $23) may prove as effective as Lott's careful study...
...It was vetoed by Governor Roy Romer (chairman of the Democratic National Committee), but if Republican State Treasurer Bill Owens wins the governorship this November as expected, he will make Colorado the thirty-second state with concealed carry...
...The five gun owners in the audience will hate that politician for life...
...Bill Clinton is not a smart Democrat...
...Worse for gun control believers is the research now proving that more guns in the hands of honest citizens reduces crime...
...Today 127 million Americans in thirty-one states —almost half the U.S...
...Florida mattered because it was a large state with a substantial urban population, and it attracted media attention...
...Gun control GROVER G. NORQUIST is president of Americans for Tax Reform...
...Lott's work has demolished gun control arguments in the eyes of honest policy-makers...
...A self-employed person with a 401K and a concealed carry permit will need the government even less...
...A pro-gun control speech to a hundred citizens might get polite applause from the soccer moms, who will forget the speech in a week...
...T he gun issue grows increasingly important as more and more state legislatures pass laws allowing citizens to carry concealed firearms...
...Despite strong lobbying from fellow Republican governors George W. Bush of Texas and Frank Keating of Oklahoma, Kansas's liberal Gov...
...In 1989, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia passed shall issue laws, and over the next seven years seventeen states followed suit: Idaho, Mississippi, Montana, Alaska, Arizona, Tennessee, Wyoming, Arkansas, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Texas, Virginia, Nevada, Utah, Kentucky, Louisiana, and South Carolina...
...Like the Sirens that lured Greek sailors onto fatal reefs, gun control is the great liberal temptation—an easy appeal to the liberal contempt for rural America...
...With the president's endorsement of the concept, the gun control lobby brought its national resources to bear on an initiative in Washington state in November 1997, hoping that a win there would show the soft underbelly of the National Rifle Association (NRA...
...In Florida, where more than 3oo,000 concealed-handgun licenses were issued between October 41987 and December 31, 1995, only five violent crimes involved permitted pistols and none resulted in death...
...Marginal congressional districts are won and lost by smaller swings than that five percent...
...Vermont did not require a permit for its citizens to carry concealed weapons...
...In New York City today, the rich and politically connected may carry concealed weapons, while shop keepers who fear robbers may not...
...Hupp ran for the 54th Legislative District in Texas and was elected to the state legislature as a supporter of concealed carry laws...
...If those states that did not permit concealed handguns in 1992 had permitted them back then, citizens would The American Spectator • November 1998 75...
...yet the measure remains popular...
...GOP concealed gun laws are spreading like wildfire...
...One of the most powerful stories in her book is that of Dr...
...population—have the right to carry concealed firearms...
...By comparison, there are only 600,000 law enforcement officers in America...
...who retired that year, told the Hill newspaper: "We unnecessarily lost good Democratic members because of their votes on the Brady bill and the semi-automatic assault weapon ban ....It was not worth it all...
...Another example of this trend is Al Gore's war on western mining: In the Rocky Mountain region and most of the Plains states that would be affected by his proposals, the Democrats hold only three House seats...
...Most states allowed the local sheriff or police chief to give permits to people who needed to carry concealed weapons, but some cities made it impossible to get permits, and in other places permits came to be handed out unfairly...
...Yet the Florida Sheriffs Association, the Florida Police Chiefs Association, and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement all supported the "shall issue" right-to-carry law...
...Gun control advocates fought the legislation, foretelling wild west shootouts and road-rage killings...
...Lott writes: Our most conservative estimates show that by adopting shall-issue laws, states reduced murders by 8.5 percent, rapes by 5 percent, aggravated assaults by 7 percent and robbery by 3 percent...
...have been spared approximately 1,57o murders, 4,177 rapes, 6o,000 aggravated assaults and 12,000 robberies...
...Yet liberals retain a near-religious faith in gun control, much like their belief in arms control during the Cold War...
...74 November 1998 • The American Spectator The momentum continues to grow...
...Serious leftists know that they cannot implement their most aggressive social engineering plans if too many Americans are armed...
...Democrats had once been that industry's major supporters, but after a decade of losing House and Senate seats in North Carolina, Kentucky, and other tobacco-growing states, they saw nothing to lose in declaring war on the entire region...
...Some liberals argue that gun control is now a safer issue for Democrats because they have lost almost all their rural, Western, and Southern congressional seats...
...Anthony Beilenson (D-Calif...
...but the votes are ready, and Nebraskans should win the right to carry concealed weapons in early 1999...
...Voters in Missouri are expected to pass a concealed carry referendum next April...
...counties from 1977 to 1992...
...I don't want any more of our fine colleagues to be sacrificed at the altar of gun control...
...C oncealed carry laws have greatly embarrassed gun control advocates by exposing their dire predictions as false...
...The study analyzed FBI crime statistics for all 3,054 U.S...
...But preference is not intensity...
...Shall issue passed both houses of the Kansas legislature in 1997...
...Last year Colorado's Republican legislature passed a shall issue law...
...He pushed through two gun control measures prior to the 1994 elections that cost the Democrats twenty-six of the net fifty-one House seats they lost on November 8. Rep...
...There are as many as 2.9 million concealed carry permit holders in the United States, and this number will only grow as more states change their laws...
...This was the same reasoning that drove Clinton to declare war on tobacco...
...The largest previous study on gun laws was of only 170 cities for one year...
...In 1987, Florida passed a law requiring law enforcement officials to grant a permit to any law-abiding citizen who passed a gun safety and competency test...
...Suzanna Gratia Hupp, a Texas woman who was with her parents in Luby's Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas, on October 16, 1991, when George Hennard crashed his truck through thewindow of the restaurant and began to shoot patrons...
...and his associate David Mustard, and has been summarized in Lott's recent book More Guns, Less Crime: Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws (University of Chicago, $23...
...Alabama and Connecticut let local authorities issue permits at their discretion, and gun owners felt they did so fairly...
...Preference gets you a "yes" answer to a pollster...
...Undaunted by the 1994 election, Clinton caught the next gun control wave: feigned interest in gun safety...
...Moderate Washington state voted down the measure by 71 percent to 29 percent...
...If you get into trouble, it is more likely that one of your fellow citizens with a concealed weapon will be nearby than a policeman...
...Before then, only Georgia, Washington state, Indiana, New Hampshire, North and South Dakota, and Maine had shall issue laws...
...advocates thought they had a winner in the seemingly modest requirement that all firearms be sold and kept with trigger locks...
...Because Texas had not yet passed its concealed carry law, Hupp's pistol was in her car glove compartment and both her parents were killed...
...The votes are also ready in the Ohio legislature and only await a new governor...
...Intensity makes gun owners contribute, organize, and drag their spouses and neighbors to the polls...
...Somebody once said that a liberal's worst nightmare was a self-employed American with a 401K pension, because he didn't want anything from the government except to be left alone...
...The most comprehensive study of shall issue laws was conducted by John R. Lott, Jr...
...Less than a year later the U.S...
...Following the Civil War, many states forbadethe practice, reflecting a belief that honest men wore their guns out where other folk could see them...
...Unwilling to blame Communists or criminals for their misdeeds, liberals attack inanimate objects: missiles and guns...
...Instead, the initiative provoked a strong organized backlash, drawing on the computer resources of the Microsoft employees' gun club...
...And at first glance gun control is a political winner— it polls well...
...In Nebraska last year, a last-minute filibuster kept the shall issue law from being considered...
Vol. 31 • November 1998 • No. 11
