Mar 30, 2015 |
via Chuck Ross at The Daily Caller
FBI director James Comey testified in front of a House panel on Wednesday to discuss the agency’s 2016 budget, but he ended up making a profound point about the issue of concealed carry.
At the end of the two-hour budget hearing, Texas U.S. Rep. John Culberson, chairman of the Appropriations Subcommittee on Justice, asked Comey about the nature of his interactions with legal concealed carry permit holders.
Before his stint as head of the FBI, Comey worked for more than two decades as a federal prosecutor.
“You mentioned earlier about criminals with guns, I doubt you’ve ever had a problem with a concealed carry permit holder who is licensed with a background check using their good judgment,” Culberson said at the end of Comey’s two-hour testimony. “Could you comment on that as a law enforcement officer?”
“I haven’t had situations where there has been problems with that,” Comey said.
“With a concealed carry permit holder?” Culberson asked.
“No, not that I can remember,” Comey said.
“That’s a law enforcement officer’s best backup, particularly if he’s a Texan,” Culberson said.
The best line from this whole piece is the last one here, suggesting that a concealed carrier is law enforcement’s best backup. If only more elected officials understood that.
For the most part concealed carriers understand that their permit is not a badge, and that the police should be called for most non-life threatening issues.
However, having a concealed firearm, and being trained with it does provide permit holders to step in and stop a crime in progress or assist police officers in dire situations.
Kudos to the FBI Director Comey for his astute comments.
It is as if the GOP took a page out of the Democrats’ book–improved, then applied it–so that just as the Democrats flooded legislatures with gun control measures in early 2013, Republicans are now flooding legislatures with bills broadening the exercise of Second Amendment rights and protecting the use of firearms for self-defense.
The move was evident on February 18 when Breitbart News reported a New York Times admission that Republican legislators from state-to-state were gaining “traction” by pushing Campus Carry as a way for women to fight rape and sexual assault. Since that time, Campus Carry has advanced in Arkansas, Florida, Texas, and Nevada, and is being considered in approximately 10 other states.
This was news because it marked a turning point wherein Republicans actually took away one of the Democrat’s go-to causes for gun control–domestic abuse–and turned it into a rallying cry for arming women.
And while Campus Carry was being pushed, a broad-based push for Constitutional Carry emerged wherein Republicans in the legislatures of Idaho, Kansas, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, West Virginia, and other states began pushing to abolish the need for a concealed carry permit. The legislatures in each of these states did so by arguing that having a permit requirement to carry a gun is tantamount to having a permit requirement to exercise Second Amendment rights, and therefore wrong.
In addition to continuing to advance Campus Carry and Constitutional Carry, Texas began pushing to become the 45th state in the union to have some type of Open Carry law on the books.
Moms Demand Action For Gun Sense in America rallied against Texas’ Open Carry legislation, and just when they appeared to have stifled it, Governor Greg Abbott (R) emerged to say Open Carry would become the law of the land in Texas as soon as legislation to carry in that fashion hits his desk.
That legislation is expected to land on his desk within weeks.
While facing these myriad defeats in state legislatures around the country, Moms Demand Action has simultaneously found it tougher and tougher to get businesses and corporations to go along with requests to disarm law-abiding citizens in their stores. Most recently, Breitbart News reported that Kroger CFO Michael Schlotman said the food retail chain rejects Moms Demand Action’s push to forbid open-carry of firearms in Kroger stores. And this announcement comes after grocer chains Fred Meyer and Harris Teeter both told Moms Demand Action the same thing.
But Moms Demand Action isn’t alone in losing big at this time. MSNBC recently reported that Everytown for Gun Safety–another pro-active, Bloomberg-funded gun control group that opposes Campus Carry–has now been relegated to the role of counting NRA victories across the country.
Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
Quinnipiac University economist Mark Gius has published a new study, "An examination of the effects of concealed weapons laws and assault weapons bans on state-level murder rates," in the journalApplied Economics Letters. From the abstract:
The purpose of the present study is to determine the effects of state-level assault weapons bans and concealed weapons laws on state-level murder rates. Using data for the period 1980 to 2009 and controlling for state and year fixed effects, the results of the present study suggest that states with restrictions on the carrying of concealed weapons had higher gun-related murder rates than other states. It was also found that assault weapons bans did not significantly affect murder rates at the state level. These results suggest that restrictive concealed weapons laws may cause an increase in gun-related murders at the state level. The results of this study are consistent with some prior research in this area, most notably Lott and Mustard (1997).
Intriguing.
For more background: The most recent Reason-Rupe poll reports that 63 percent of Americans don't believe that stricter gun laws would keep weapons out of the hands of criminals.
http://reason.com/blog/2013/12/23/concealed-carry-fewer-murders-says-new-s
