Guest Column
Gun rights issue about to be resurrected in Congress
By Gary Palmer Alabama Policy Institute

During the 2006 election gun control hardly came up, and even when it did in key swing races, both Democrat and Republican candidates usually came across as staunch defenders of every American's Second Amendment right. But the fact is, the liberal leadership of the Democrat majority in Congress will be hard pressed to ignore an issue so important to their hard-core left base, a base that is staunchly committed to restricting the people's right to keep and bear arms.

But they may not get the chance to fire the first shot on this issue. Republican Senator John Thune of South Dakota has already introduced legislation to allow national recognition of right-to-carry (RTC) permits. This national reciprocity bill, which is also being introduced in the House by Florida Republican Representative Cliff Stearns, would treat state issued firearms permits like state issued drivers licenses allowing people to legally carry their guns into any state.

You can count on some serious wailing from the liberals about how allowing people the right to take their firearms across state lines will endanger women and children and result in an epidemic of gun violence. For years liberals have misrepresented the danger of legal gun ownership and suppressed or ignored data proving legal gun ownership does not pose a danger to the public. Much to the disappointment of liberals, study after study has found that more guns do not mean more crime nor does more gun control mean less crime.

Gun control advocates claim that the private ownership of guns leads to higher rates of murder and suicide as well as accidental deaths. National data indicates otherwise. The U.S. Department of Treasury reported that in 2005 gun sales were up by 2.6 percent yet during the same period gun crimes declined by 2.4 percent, firearm-related suicides were down 1.1percent and accidental firearm deaths reached an all-time low as did accidental firearm deaths of children under age 14.

It should be noted that these remarkable declines have occurred as gun ownership reached an all-time high. According to the U.S. Department of Treasury, as of 2005 there were over 290 million legally owned firearms in almost 110 million households in the U.S.

Studies published between 1997 and 2005 by the Congressional Research Service, the Library of Congress, the National Institute for Justice, the National Academy of Sciences and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention evaluated the impact of gun control laws such as the Brady Bill and the socalled assault weapons ban, and also evaluated gun control laws in foreign countries and reached the same basic conclusion: there is no evidence that gun control reduces crime.

Even a report on the effectiveness of the so-called assault weapons ban commissioned by the pro-gun control Urban Institute concluded that, "At best, the assault weapons ban can have only a limited effect on total gun murders, because the banned weapons and magazines were never involved in more than a modest fraction of all gun murders."

These studies were all conducted during the time frame in which the Brady Bill requirement for a waiting period for firearm purchases expired (1998) and was replaced by instant background checks and the 2004 expiration of the federal assault weapons ban. In regard to each of these laws, gun control advocates predicted an escalation in gun-related crimes and accidental deaths. But the data proves gun crime and accidental deaths declined across the board.

What is perhaps even more interesting is that as violent crime and accidental deaths from guns have gone down, the number of states that have right-to-carry (RTC) laws allowing citizens to carry a concealed weapon for personal protection has more than tripled. Since 1986 the number of RTC states increased from just 10 states to 36, with 23 states enacting RTC laws since 1991. Alabama, Connecticut and Iowa have "discretionary or may issue" permit systems and Vermont allows the right to carry without a permit. Eight other states have "restrictive discretionary issue" which means the citizen must prove a need for carrying a firearm. Only two states, Wisconsin and Illinois, still deny citizens their right to carry firearms for their protection.

Don't expect these facts to change the gun-control advocates' point of view. When it comes to gun control, they count on the liberal media to promote any legislation they introduce while ignoring or suppressing any good news about the decline in violent crime. And liberal politicians and liberal media will hype every firearm related crime as though the nation is about to be overrun by insurgents.

Hopefully, with gun ownership at an all-time high and more people registering to carry a firearm for personal protection, there will not be many politicians willing to support gun control legislation. Even with the pressure from their liberal base, that is a "target" that many of them will not want painted on their backs. In fact, with so many self-proclaimed "pro-gun, pro-Second Amendment" Democrats in Congress, Sen. Thune's bill to legalize the right-to-carry anywhere in the nation should have a chance to pass. At the very least it should help to separate the true defenders of the Second Amendment from the pretenders.

Gary Palmer is president of the Alabama Policy Institute.

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