An Op-Ed piece that challenged the gun control lobby to “find common ground” on gun rights – rather than gun control – has been met with silence, even after appearing in a half-dozen newspapers around the country in cities as distant from one another as Pittsburgh and Spokane.
Has the gun prohibition movement suddenly lost its voice? Not hardly, since anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety and the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility, which also has billionaire backing, continue to use the email to beg for money they don’t need to support gun control laws that critics contend don’t work.
Maybe it’s the content of the challenges.
- Can we agree that the Second Amendment should be treated with the same respect as the other amendments in the Bill of Rights?
- An oft-repeated demand from the gun control lobby is that we should license gun owners and register their guns, same as we do with automobiles. Can we agree that such licenses would be issued to any law-abiding citizen who wants one, and that they are automatically recognized by every other state without exception?
- Can we agree that gun safety needs to be part of the public school curriculum, then?
- Can both sides agree that if photo ID should not be required to vote, it should also not be required to exercise the rights protected by the Second Amendment?
The answer to all of these is “Apparently not,” since there has been silence. It’s not because anti-gunners haven’t read the piece. Considering where it has been published, that just doesn’t seem possible.
The more likely scenario is that for all their talk, anti-gunners don’t care to discuss gun rights, nor do they wish to entertain the idea of genuine gun safety courses taught in public schools by certified firearms instructors.
They definitely don’t wish to allow firearm sales without a photo ID.
As for treating the Second Amendment equally to the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights, presumably that’s a non-starter with anti-gunners.
Instead, Everytown continues to fight concealed carry reciprocity, asserting that it would “remove local governments’ ability to maintain sensible gun standards, and keep a proper vetting process in place …”
Larry Keane, senior vice president and general counsel to the National Shooting Sports Foundation responded to this assertion: “This is just plain wrong. (T)he bill would allow states to set their own laws and regulations. If a state requires a permit to carry concealed, and a firearms owner comes from a state that has Constitutional carry, that person would be required to obtain a permit from their home state before carrying a firearm concealed in their neighboring state with stricter concealed carry laws.”
When Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi tweeted that House passage of H.R. 38, the reciprocity bill, amounted to “Inviting violent criminals” and “domestic abusers to carry concealed weapons,” the Washington Post Fact Checker gave her a whopping Three Pinocchios, which is tantamount to calling her arguments fibs. Here’s the full text of Pelosi’s Dec. 6 tweet:
“Inviting violent criminals to carry concealed weapons doesn’t save lives. Inviting domestic abusers to carry concealed weapons doesn’t save lives. Inviting convicted stalkers to carry concealed weapons doesn’t save lives. Yet the @HouseGOP just voted to do exactly that.”
Here’s how the Washington Post explained its conclusion:
“Pelosi’s tweet inspired such anger because responsible gun owners believe their rights are being curtailed, even if they follow the concealed-carry rules — while violent criminals who want to have a gun are not going to be bothered with following such rules in the first place.
“We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios but ultimately settled on Three because her last line — ‘the @HouseGOP just voted to do exactly that’ — is so over the top and exaggerated. One can have a respectful political debate, raising the issue of a lower common denominator for concealed-weapons permits, without accusing the other side of voting to let violent criminals and stalkers have guns.”
That “respectful political debate” is what the Op-Ed is seeking.
