The Flaw
I think there are more than a few things fundamentally wrong with this story:
Edwin F. Hale Sr. will keep his gun permit even after bringing a loaded .38-caliber revolver into BWI Marshall Airport last month.The problem is not with Hale getting to keep his permit. It seems by even the Byzantine concealed carry permit laws in Maryland that Hale meets the standards to keep his permit.
Anthony McLean won't get to keep his gun permit, because he was convicted of breaking and entering more than a quarter-century ago.
The two cases have different facts and raise different issues, but they provide a rare — if narrow — glimpse into the secretive gun permitting process in Maryland.
It's the fact that Ed Hale can have a permit to carry a gun and most average Marylanders cannot. And it isn't a new phenomenon: just last year we chronicled the fact that Baltimore City Council President Jack Young packs heat. But Democratic leaders in Maryland refuse to budge on the idea that allowing concealed carry permits would make the streets dangerous when common sense and statistical evidence prove that idea to the contrary while they and opinion makers continue to hold to this juvenile idea that guns are bad.
Permits for people like Ed Hale and Jack Young prove one thing; in Maryland the right to effective personal protection and concealed carry permits are generally afforded to the politically connected. It makes little sense why Maryland remains stuck in the past, and why our citizens are not allowed the full and legal right of personal protection like that majority of Americans currently do.
2 comments:
With you on this, Brian. Much of anti-gun resistance, I remain convinced, comes not from a cold analysis of crime risks or even personal losses or tragedies from guns but from a cultural resistance to guns among people who did not grow up with guns and associate them only with a) crime and b) déclassé NOKD ("not our kind, dear") rural Americans.
What's ironic is that most of the protestors in Libya, Eqypt, Tunisia, etc. are trained in guns but don't have access to them. The protestors are mostly men and those countries have universal conscription where soldiers train with live ammo; those countries ban most private arms partially because of terrorism concerns but really out of fear of the next Paul Revere. On the other hand, we have access to long guns and some access to handguns, but most men and women (myself included) are not trained in their use, safety, cleaning, repair, etc., especially in the cities and suburbs.
Reasonable people cannot look at the 1st Amendment as a bulwark against tyranny, the 3rd Amendment as a bulwark against tyranny (quartering of soldiers), the 4th Amendment as a bulwark against tyranny, the 5th Amendment as a bulwark against tyranny and the 2nd Amendment as the tyrant's implement of oppression. Let every willing free man be armed.
MD's hostility towards handguns goes beyond the concealed carry issue. If I wanted to go to a range to fire a pistol, and I was driving a pickup, I would be in technical violation of state law if the pistol was unloaded, with a trigger lock, in a locked container but carried in the cab of the truck.
Could I beat this with a decent lawyer? More than likely... depending upon which county I live in.
Post a Comment