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http://www.ocala.com/article/20090126/ARTICLES/901260255
Stearns goes on offensive to push concealed-weapons law
By Bill Thompson
Staff Writer
Published: Monday, January 26, 2009 at 5:34 p.m.
Last Modified: Monday, January 26, 2009 at 5:45 p.m.
OCALA - Saying Americans need a "fighting chance" to confront outlaws in a violent society, U.S. Rep Cliff Stearns has gone on the offensive to promote his bill to allow concealed-weapons permit-holders to cross state lines without fear of having their constitutional rights curtailed by another state's laws.
In an op-ed that appeared Monday on the Web site of the conservative publication Human Events, the Ocala Republican championed his measure as a way to enhance public safety as well as counteract liberal anti-gun activists whose policies he believes seek to undermine the Second Amendment protections afforded to gun owners.
But an anti-gun group questions whether Stearns and a co-sponsor of the legislation, Rep. Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, should be writing gun policy for states that seek an alternative route.
Stearns and Boucher filed the bill, known formally as the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2009 (H.R. 197), earlier this month.
The bill would cause states that issue concealed-weapons permits to recognize valid permits held by visitors from other concealed-carry states, such as Florida. Yet those permit-holders would be subject to the regulations of the host state, not those of their home state.
If the host state does not issue concealed-weapons permits, the holder of a valid concealed-carry license would still be allowed to carry their weapon almost anywhere while in that state. They would not be permitted to carry their weapons into police stations, jails, courthouses, polling places, government meetings, schools, sporting events unrelated to firearms, in areas of bars or other places licensed for on-site consumption of alcohol where guns are prohibited, or inside the passenger area of airports.
The law would also not apply to people who are barred by federal law from possessing, transporting, shipping, or receiving a firearm, nor would it allow a machine gun or a "destructive device" to be transported across state lines.
Other than in 2005 and ‘06, according to the FBI, the rate of violent crime — defined as murder and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rape, robbery and aggravated assault — has been on a steady downhill march since 1991. The agency's most recent report showed that the violent crime rate again began to drop in 2007 after the brief uptick and will do so again in 2008, based on preliminary data.
In his op-ed Stearns attributed this decline to the rise in concealed-carry laws.
He notes that states enacting concealed-carry laws have significantly less violent crime, as measured by the FBI, with 30 percent fewer murders, 46 percent fewer robberies and 12 percent fewer aggravated assaults. Overall, their crime rates are down 22 percent.
In Florida, which has had a concealed-carry law for more than two decades, murder rates have dropped 58 percent in that time, while violent crime overall is down 32 percent.
Stearns also observes that a U.S. Department of Justice survey of 2,000 criminals revealed that one-third of them had been "scared off, shot at, wounded or captured" by a gun-toting would-be victim. Moreover, 40 percent of them confessed that they had been deterred from committing a crime because they thought the victim was armed.
"Allowing law-abiding people to arm themselves offers more than peace of mind for those individuals — it pays off for everybody through lower crime rates. . . . That is why more and more states have passed right-to-carry laws over the past decade."
But in addition to public safety, Stearns pushes the constitutional correctness of his cause.
"So many liberal politicians and self-appointed experts want to keep honest Americans from having access to firearms," despite the apparent deterrent effect, Stearns wrote. "The reverse logic of this ‘knee jerk' reaction is astounding and has led to an outright assault on our basic constitutional and natural rights. These misguided policies to keep firearms out of the hands of law-abiding citizens literally meant a death sentence for thousands of Americans."
"Our society is a violent society," Stearns concludes. "However, the innocent deserve access to the tools they need to defend themselves. Let's give those who decide to take responsibility of possessing a concealed-carry permit a fighting chance anywhere in America."
One supporter of the Stearns-Boucher bill described it as the missing link in American's gun policy.
John M. Snyder, public affairs director of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, in a statement urging more members of Congress to sign on to the measure, noted that "gun grabbers slather at the potential for passing restrictive gun control legislation" with Democrats in control of both the White House and Congress.
Snyder argued that Democrats suffered considerably at the polls the last time a Democratic-led Congress "went gung-ho for gun control." That was 1994, when Congress, with then-President Clinton's approval, enacted the since-expired ban on semiautomatic weapons. The Republicans took over that year, only to relinquish control in 2006.
Noting the sunset of that prohibition and the recent Supreme Court decision overturning Washington, D.C.'s ban on handgun ownership, "Snyder adds, "What has been missing is federal right to carry concealed legislation so that persons permitted to carry in a state may carry in other states, in much the same way as people licensed to drive in a state may drive in other states."
Yet a spokesman for a leading gun control group cautioned against putting too much faith in the safety or constitutional arguments for the Stearns-Boucher bill.
For one thing, Florida is a "terrible example" of the effectiveness of concealed-carry laws, said Doug Pennington, spokesman for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.
Pennington pointed out that the same FBI reports Stearns relies on show that since 1987, when Florida enacted its concealed weapons law, until 2004, the state was the most violent, or second-most violent, state in America. The most recent report had it fifth.
"Exporting the Florida model to the rest of the country is probably not the greatest policy idea ever conceived," Pennington said.
He challenged Stearns' claim about the link between the drop in violence and the passage in concealed-carry laws as a "huge, complex, maddening" circumstance that defies such a simplistic explanation.
Crime dropped, Pennington maintains, also because tougher mandatory-sentencing laws kept violent criminals behind bars longer, because the economy improved and unemployment dipped and because there was more public education about gun crimes.
Moreover, the 1993 Brady Act has since 1994 precluded the sales of firearms to 1.6 million people who failed to pass federal mandatory background checks for several reasons, including being barred because of a criminal background, exhibiting a propensity for violence, or having mental health problems.
But the constitutional rationale cuts both ways, he maintains, for Wisconsin and Illinois, which do not have right-to-carry laws, or the 15 others that claim some discretion over who gets issued a concealed-weapons permit. (Thirty-three states, including Florida, are classified as "shall-issue," meaning the state cannot deny a permit to someone who meets all the legal criteria.)
"At least two states don't want it for their own reasons," Pennington said, "and it's wrong for a congressman from Florida or anywhere else to tell people in those states what kind of gun laws they should have."
Bill Thompson can be reached at 867-4117.