Carrying Concealed Logic - David Loftus

This week the Judiciary Committee of the Oregon House approved a bill to remove the list of concealed weapons permits from the public record. On Thursday it passed the House, 42-18. A similar bill has been put before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

I feel I’m missing something here, but I nearly always have that reaction when trying to understand where gun fanatics are coming from. They take a fairly simple proposition—gun ownership gives one the ability to protect one’s own freedom and liberty—and then defend it to the most illogical extremes. In this case, why would anybody who has a concealed weapon permit want to keep it a secret?

It seems to me that if you’re a proud gun owner, you would have no reason to hide it. In fact, if you’re looking for security by licensing your right to carry a concealed weapon in public, your personal security would only increase the more people had reason to believe you might be armed. Possession of a gun permit doesn’t mean you always have a gun on you; you might obtain a permit and choose never to carry a weapon. But the general knowledge that you could have one on your person would make everyone else less apt to mess with you, I should have thought.

Apparently, House Bill 2787 was pushed by the Oregon State Sheriffs’ Association, partly in the wake of a controversy in southern Oregon several years back when a female teacher was rumored to have obtained a permit for a concealed weapon so that she might carry a gun to school to protect herself from an estranged husband. The local newspaper requested the list of local permits, the sheriff’s office fought release of the list, saying “disclosure would unreasonably invade the personal privacy of concealed handgun licensees,” and between 2007 and 2009 several levels of state courts ruled the information was not exempt from public disclosure laws.

Kevin Starrett, director of the Oregon Firearms Educational Foundation, which helped fund the court fight against the release of the information, said, “The public records law was intended for public entities and government, not the activities of private citizens. We’re disappointed that the courts and the legislature can’t see the difference.” Now, apparently various interests are trying to shut down that option through the state legislature.

Mr. Starrett doesn’t seem to grasp that the issuance of concealed gun permits is in fact a government function, one that at least tries to ensure that dangerous individuals such as convicted felons with violent pasts don’t get to carry guns around legally—just as the government issues driver’s licenses to people who have demonstrated that they have the training and ability not to endanger the lives of fellow citizens with an automobile . . . and takes those licenses away when they fail to do so.

I try to make sense of this, and the only thing I can think of (besides the notion that some gun owners might possibly be ashamed of having other people know they own a gun) is the fear that perhaps if a list of gun owners were published, their homes might be burgled by criminals who wanted to steal the firearms. But this doesn’t make much sense.

First, the newspaper which sought the list in the southern Oregon case has said it had no intention of publishing it. They just wanted to find out whether this particular teacher might have obtained a permit so that she potentially could be breaking a school district policy that prohibited guns on school grounds. Since the sheriff’s office wouldn’t tell them just that, the newspaper had to go to court to obtain the entire list. Second, if criminals are not deterred by the knowledge that there might be a gun in a house, then the whole IRA-Second Amendment notion of personal security and individual freedom maintained by a firearm gets a little shaky, doesn’t it?

Personally, I don’t know why this country hasn’t banned handguns altogether. When I was police reporter in southern Oregon myself, I had to report the news of a little 4-year-old boy getting blown away by his brother when they found and played with an adult’s handgun in their home. More than 40,000 Americans die every year from gun violence, much of it involving simple accidents as well as passionate outbursts of trigger-happy violence between family members and couples.

Statistics reliably show that far from protecting the home, a gun is more likely to harm one of the residents in a mishap or get stolen by a burglar. How many of those 6 people who died and 13 that were injured in Tucson two months ago would be all right today if Jared Lee Loughner had sought to assassinate U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords armed with a knife and gotten tackled by bystanders with just that instead of a 9mm Glock pistol? How many thousands of innocent victims of accidents and family fights would still be around if they could only punch or stab one another when they flew off the handle?