More Bad News for the Antis
Apparently, It Sucks to be Them
In case you haven't heard, the Missouri legislature overrode the governor's veto of Missouri's equivalent of the Minnesota Personal Protection Act; thirty days from that, on October 11, Missouri's shall-issue handgun law takes effect.There's been a very strange thing going on over the past couple of decades. Gun restrictions have proliferated all over the place. There's now the national waiting period, the required NICS check when purchasing a handgun, restrictions on import and manufacture of "high capacity" magazines and "assault weapons."
You'd think that the antis would be happy.
They're not. The single most important change has been in the proliferation of "shall issue" laws.
Consider this graphic on Jeff Dege's website:
1985: nine shall-issue states (actually, it's eight plus Vermont -- while Vermont doesn't issue permits at all, no permit is necessary in Vermont)
2003: thirty-six shall issue states (including Vermont and Alaska)
... and the year's not over, yet. There's still the possibility of Wisconsin and Ohio.
Those of us involved in carry reform have gone from saying, "a small but significant number of states" have such laws, to "the majority of states, containing the majority of the US population", and when one more state passes, we'll be able to substitute "three-quarters of the states".
It's been a huge thing.
So why hasn't it gotten a lot of attention? During the debate over the MPPA, the antis were able to get away with suggesting that the MPPA was some sort of new and radical idea, when it was nothing of the sort. Some folks think in terms of conspiracy; I don't. I think it's as simple as this:
The sky doesn't fall.
When a shall-issue law passes, yes, there's an increase in the number of permits issued, and a corresponding small decrease in violent crime. But it's a small decrease, and, by and large, everybody's life goes on as it has before. Permit issuance is a real thing, but it's a largely invisible thing—it's not just that most permit holders never have to take their guns out in self-defense, although that's certainly true—but you almost never so much as see a gun on a permit holder's hip.
I do seem to come back to this often, and here we go again:
The sky isn't falling.
Except, of course, for those who worry about law-abiding citizens being able to defend themselves in public. For folks like those, the last eighteen years have been an ongoing nightmare.
And their nightmare is only getting worse.