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http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/09/05/opinion/edverlyn.php
Minnesota blows away public safety
Verlyn Klinkenborg The New York Times
NEW YORK A couple of weeks ago, I checked into a hotel in Bloomington, a Minneapolis suburb framed by the airport and the Mall of America. On the hotel door was a sign: "Firearms Banned on These Premises." The next day I drove to St. Joseph, an hour west of the Twin Cities, where I saw the same sign. Slowly the logical conclusion sank in. If firearms are banned on these premises, then they must not be banned in other places.
Sure enough, a year ago the state Legislature passed a "concealed carry" law, which means that it's legal to carry a concealed weapon if you have a permit. So that no one misses the point, the Legislature has also turned Minnesota into what is called a "shall require" state. If you apply for a concealed-weapon permit, the local authorities must grant it to you.
I asked one of the state coalitions opposed to these laws whether it would attack them in the Legislature this year. The answer was no. It is too busy trying to defeat a "shoot first" bill, which would give gun owners the right to fire away instead of trying to avoid a confrontation. The way I see it, Minnesota is only one step away from requiring every citizen to carry a gun and use it when provoked.
There are some other twists to these laws. A person carrying a concealed weapon cannot be banned from a public building, even if it's a library full of kids. Churches have succeeded in keeping guns out of the pews, but they're having to fight another court battle to keep them out of the parking lot. The application for a concealed-weapon permit appears to have been created by people who believe the real threat in carrying a gun is the loss of privacy entailed in filling out the form. Yet it isn't possible for a member of the public to find out who has received a permit.
This is what I'd expect of Florida, which recently passed a "shoot first" - also called a "shoot the Avon lady" - bill. I'd expect it of Texas too. But Minnesota? I grew up thinking of Minnesota as a socially progressive state. After all, it was home of the Democratic Farmer Labor Party and a place where local control and common sense had strong roots.
Like my family in Iowa, Minnesotans were gun owners because they hunted pheasants and rabbits and deer. But then I'm thinking of a time when the leadership of the National Rifle Association resembled a band of merry sportsmen and not the paranoid cabal it is today. Whether this was also a time when a legislator could vote his conscience, and not his gun lobbyist's orders, I was too young to know.
I grew up hunting and shooting, and I still own two rifles and two shotguns. When I was young, I expected that I would own guns when I grew up because I enjoyed hunting and I liked the good hunters I knew - as I still do.
But to me, owning guns and knowing how to use them properly was part of a civic bargain. I would leave the police work to the police, and they would leave the squirrel hunting to me. The notion that 38 states would have "concealed carry" laws in 2006 would have seemed insane, a regression to a more primitive idea of who we are.
The NRA would argue that American society has changed since those innocent days. But society hasn't changed nearly as much as the NRA has - or America's ideas about the balance of individual and collective rights.
Every concealed weapon, with very few exceptions, is a blow against the public safety. The new gun laws in Minnesota take away local discretion over concealed-weapon permits, and they cost the local authorities plenty too.
But there's a bigger problem. By focusing so obsessively on an individual's rights - in this case, the purported individual right to bear arms in the library - all other rights are shoved aside. Police departments are forced to grant concealed-weapon permits to individuals who have little of the training and certainly none of the restrictions that police officers have.
What's worse, by granting this right to individuals, the law strips the public of its right to occupy public spaces without the threat of being shot. The police are trained to handle guns. No one is safer if gun- carrying civilians believe their rights entitle them to pretend they're cops.
Sometimes I think the NRA isn't really about guns at all. It's about making certain that the public has no ability to limit the rights of an individual. That is really what the logic of the "concealed carry" and "shall require" and "shoot first" laws says.
Guns make a perfect test case, because the end result is an armed cohort that is very prickly about its personal rights. The NRA has armed the thousands of Minnesotans who applied for a permit once the "concealed carry" law passed. But it has disarmed the public by making sure that legislators will no longer vote for gun laws that protect the rest of society.
Verlyn Klinkenborg is a member of the New York Times editorial board.
