The Sky Still Isn't Falling, Part XXIV

by Joel Rosenberg
8-Feb-2004

I don't make this stuff up, you know.

Sigh.

Here we go again:

The Sky Really Isn't Falling, Jocelyn

Pioneer Press | 02/06/2004 | LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: DANGEROUS GUN LAW

Nah. Dangerous lack of thought. Jocelyn Hale, who should know better, writes in response to Joe Soucheray's excellent column of the other day.

Joe Soucheray, like the legislators who authored the law, implies that conceal and carry laws cause no problems ("MABS can claim huge numbers; repeal effort can't," Feb. 4). The truth is that incidents happen all the time.

The Minnesota Citizens Personal Protection Act has been in place since April of last year, and "shall-issue" permit policies have been issued in several counties for, literally, decades. The vast majority of states now have such laws. Where's the problems? If they happen "all the time," surely there must be many.

Everybody has either been in a traffic accident, or knows somebody who has. How many people even know of somebody who has been around an "incident" involving the improper use of a handgun by a permit holder?

I don't see a lot of hands.

Jocelyn, is your hand up? I didn't think so.

There is no magic that makes permit holders more responsible than anyone else. Like everyone else, they will make mistakes, get angry and sometimes act irresponsibly.

A fair complaint, perhaps, if a bit theoretical.

Theory is fine; but reality has a way of trumping it. Her theory is belied by the nationwide reports that show permit holders vastly more law-abiding and nonconfrontational than even other normally law-abiding citizens.

Magic isn't involved; just the training and common sense of competent, law-abiding adults, who have, typically, gone to the trouble to have taken a course and gone to the further trouble to apply for a permit.

Given the history, this fear of permit holders doesn't have much of anything to do with reality; unreasonable, unsubstantiated fears are much better addressed with one's therapist than one's legislator.

The only reason they instill fear is that, unlike the rest of us, they'll be equipped with loaded handguns.

Relax, Jocelyn, the sky isn't falling. And your unsubstantiated fears are your problem; please don't try to make them mine.

Me, I got "angry" and "acted irresponsibly" the other day. It's true. My younger daughter had ruined one of my vests—that was the angry part. The "irresponsibly"? I spent too much for its replacement.

Waving my gun around? Nah—are you crazy?

You're making a claim, Jocelyn: that permit holders do bad things with their handguns "all the time."

Back it up.

What? You can't? Well, yeah.

"Minnesotans Against Being Shot" could also be the "Innocent Bystanders Club."

It could also be called "Citizens for a Safer Minnesota", or the "Repeal Conceal Coalition", or a number of other things. It's really just Rebecca Thoman and a few of her friends, and if you double or triple or quadruple the number of names you give this little bunch, that doesn't make them any more numerous, or any more rational.

No one wants to be shot, but the gun lobby's solution to arm everyone is ludicrous.

Let's break this down a bit. A bit of background, first.

This is really bad. Jocelyn should be ashamed. It's one thing when Rebecca Thoman expresses herself badly—at least she can plead clumsiness, rather than copping to dishonesty. Rebecca is, by profession, a physician specializing in womens' sexual dysfunction issues. When she speaks on medication to enhance womens' orgasms, she's obviously an expert, but when it comes to matters around firearms, she's out of her depth, both in professional credentials and knowledge. But, at least, she's got a copout: she's a doctor, and doctors can't be expected to write well.

Jocelyn Hale doesn't have that excuse available.

Besides being a fulltime, stay-at-home parent, Jocelyn Hale, a 1985 graduate of Brown University, is a part-time professional freelance writer and regular contributor to the slick Minnesota Monthly, with many other publications to her credit, some of them quite good, although a touch on the self-absorbed, like this one about an encounter at a cocktail party that she published in her alma mater's Alumni Magazine.

Besides the cocktail parties, and attending CSM/Minnesotans Against Being Shot/Repeal Conceal Coalition/WhateverElseThey'reCallingThemselvesThis week rallies in her apparently copious free time, she manages to serve as a director of The Loft, an NEA- and Minnesota Art Board-supprted local hangout on Washington Avenue for the lit'ry crowd which touts itself as "the nation's largest and most comprehensive literary center." (In fairness, the Loft does, occasionally, lower themselves to inviting a skiffy writer or somebody else who actually makes a living at the keyboard to speak. Yup; I've been there, done that.)

My point is this: Jocelyn has reasonable claims of professional status as a wordsmith. She's not some illiterate boob off the street; when she uses words, she can be presumed to know what they mean, and, as a professional writer, she can reasonably be expected to do at least a little cursory research before putting her well-manicured fingers to the keyboard.

Instead, she uses terms lazily and inaccurately. Deliberately? I dunno; maybe she's just willfully ignorant.

First, what is this "gun lobby"? Anybody who followed the passage of the MCPPA with any attention at all knows that it wasn't the NRA or some sort of amorphous "gun lobby" that brought us this; it was a grass-roots effort, spearheaded in the legislature by Lynda Boudreau and Pat Pariseau, and in the public debate by a bunch of folks with not much in common but a desire to reform Minnesota's antiquated, bureaucrats-know-best carry law: GOCRA/CCRN. It was people like Joe, Tim, David, Alfred, Lonn, John, Marilyn and hundreds of others -- even, to a much lesser extent, me—writing letters, making phone calls, showing up to testify at hearings, and so forth. It's not a well-financed lobbying campaign like "Citzens for a Safer Minnesota"; the money that funded CCRN's mailings was contributed in ones and fives and tens by people stopping by at Alfred's table at, literally, hundreds of gun shows.

It was as classic a grass-roots organizing effort as ever there was. "Gun lobby," pfui. She might as well blame it on the boogeyman.

That aside, let's move on: "the gun lobby's solution to arm everyone."

Waitaminute. Who is this "everyone?" Only competent, law-abiding adult Minnesotans can qualify for permits; that leaves out, obviously, anybody who isn't competent or law-abiding or at least twenty-one.

Secondly, who's arming whom? The MCPPA—and GOCRA/CCRN—doesn't "arm" anyone; it makes it possible for qualified individuals, who are willing to take training, file an application, and meet the qualifications to get a carry permit if they choose to. It's a matter of choice, and it's hard to believe that there's anybody on the board of the ever politically corr—I mean, culturally sensitive The Loft isn't prochoice in other contexts. Why not this one?

In fact, we've seen clearly that irresponsible adults—people like Jocelyn, who apparently doesn't trust herself not to shoot somebody when she gets irritated—wisely choose not to get carry permits.

"Arm everyone"?

Nope; the MCPPA is a pro-choice piece of legislation, that allows qualified individuals to make their own choices about such important matters as having a handgun available in public for self-defense.

Choice is, I think, a good thing. And it's working.

Onward.

Having more guns readily available in the community

Nice professional chops, Jocelyn. Instead of trotting out the old, tired, inaccurate cliche, "guns on the street," you trot out a new, tired, inaccurate cliche, and avoid the key concept: to whom are these "more guns" "readily available"? Avoid the passive voice, Jocelyn; surely, you learned that at Brown. They've got a pretty good English department.

To whom? Answer: to qualifying trained, law-abiding, competent adults, who are statistically far less dangerous than, say, organizers of the Million Mom March are. It's not quite impossible to find examples of permit holders behaving irresponsibly in public with lawfully carried firearms, but it's difficult, because it's rare. Despite there being millions and millions of permit holders across the country, when the anti-self-defense Brady Center went looking for examples, they had to pad out their list with reports that didn't involve permit holders, and including incidents of what was proven in court to be self-defense; the Brady Center, having found little, had to argue that lawful self-defense were examples of permit holders' crimes.

Nope.

means that more guns will be used.

Used for what? Used for murder, rape, assault, robbery? Nah. There have been thousands of permit holders in Minnesota for decades, and the ranks have doubled since the MCPPA passed, and they'll probably double again this year.

How about "Used properly, in self-defense." Are you simply expressing yourself inutterably clumsily, or do you really think that's a bad thing?

I was just thinking, the other day, that during the time that she was being grabbed by somebody, Dru Sjodin had the ability to manipulate her cell phone, to try to call her boyfriend for help; the call was traced, although it didn't do any good. A Kel-Tec P32—a small handgun—is about the size of a cellphone, and it could easily have done her a lot more good.

Think about it, Jocelyn. Please.

Renaming things doesn't change reality. Labelling things doesn't change reality. The reality is that modern, mainstream, commonsense permit laws like the Minnesota Citizens Personal Protection Act are in force in more than thirty-five states, and that in each one of those states, the Chicken Little cries of the sky falling have proven to be just chin music.

Your fears and fantasies, Jocelyn, are properly your concern; please don't try to make them into my reality. Your fearful obsessions about your neighbors can't be solved by a change in the law that, frankly, just isn't going to come close to happening.

Let's not wait for a local tragedy before we undo this dangerous law.

JOCELYN HALE

Because, as Jocelyn either knows or should know, if we do wait for "a local tragedy" caused by a permit holder's misbehavior, it'll be a long wait indeed, by which time, statistically, two orders of magnitude more tragedies will have been prevented because some law-abiding, competent adult had the means to protect herself, or himself.

Relax, Jocelyn; the sky isn't falling.

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