Vin Suprynowicz

As of July 1, Kansas residents are again be able to lawfully carry concealed handguns without a permit.

Introduced in the state Senate in January with an impressive 26 co-sponsors, the Sunflower State’s new “Constitutional carry” bill swept the senate 31-7 and cleared the house in March by a bipartisan 85-39 margin, reports Chris Eger, an NRA-certified firearms instructor, at guns.com.

In keeping with the federal Second Amendment, Vermont has allowed its citizens -– and even visitors -– to carry concealed weapons without a permit for as long as anyone can remember. For just as long, Vermont has also been one of the most peaceful, violence-free states in the union.
(You’d think members of any group supposedly devoted to “stopping gun violence” would want to give that a little thought.)

In recent years, Arizona, Alaska, Arkansas and Wyoming have joined Vermont in trusting their adult citizens to go armed, as was common nationwide during the nation’s first century-and-a-half, when most communities didn’t even see the need for a police department . . . until the rise of the socialists.

Kansas now makes six.

Since 2006, when the Kansas Legislature passed the Personal and Family Protection Act, an estimated 90,000 Kansans have applied for concealed-carry handgun licenses. Some 36 states recognize Kansas permits, while the state in turn recognizes all out-of-state permits. The new law retains this current permit system, for Kansas residents who wish to carry concealed while traveling out of state.

Republican Gov. Sam Brownback signed the popular new “constitutional carry” bill this spring. “Responsible gun ownership, for protection and sport, is a right inherent in our Constitution,” Brownback said at the signing ceremony. “It is a right that Kansans hold dear and have repeatedly and overwhelmingly reaffirmed a commitment to protecting.”

The governor also cautioned that, although the new bill does not require safety training, those who choose to protect themselves take such a course, anyway.

VICTIM DISARMAMENT

Doomsayers from the ranks of the victim disarmament lobby were in full cry, of course.

“Kansas just became a far more dangerous place today, for law enforcement and civilians alike,” announced the “Coalition to Stop Gun Violence” in a prepared statement. (For the record, police are civilians.) “Reckless and immoral public policy that will greatly benefit individuals with a history of violence who cannot pass a background check. And leave it to one of the most incompetent governors in this country, Sam Brownback, to lecture reporters about the importance of firearms training during the signing while making sure no one carrying guns in his state will ever have to have any.”

Although I’m sure this gets a little tedious, let’s work it through, again: A woman home alone at night or with only her young children hears someone breaking in through the back door. If the law makes it hard for a law-abiding citizen to possess a firearm, our law-abiding young mom will almost certainly not have a firearm with which to defend herself or her kids. (Yes, she can probably call police, though courts have ruled she has no cause of action if police knock on the door, hear nothing, and then leave – because the assailant has gagged her or put a gun to her head. Look up the 1981 case Warren v. District of Columbia.)

Does it therefore follow that the home invader — his mind set on robbery, rape, or whatever other opportunities present themselves — will be unarmed, since he “cannot pass a background check”?

In your dreams. There are millions of guns and knives in America, almost every thug and criminal who wants one has one, and you won’t find them hanging around a brightly lit, licensed gun store, staring into the security cameras and waiting to hear whether they’ve “passed the background check.”

The only change likely to occur in this equation when we make it easier for law-abiding citizens to exercise their God-given, constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms is that the young mom is then far more likely to have the kind of self-defense weapon most useful for a small person against a large person, especially a large person whose drug consumption patterns mean he’s likely “feeling no pain” -– that being a handgun.

Statistically, what’s the result -– more dead burglars and would-be rapists? Actually, not by much (though I fail to see why that would be so bad.) Rather, when intended victims announce they’re armed and ready to open fire –- especially if this warning is accompanied by the sound of a slide being racked — bad guys have a tendency to turn and run. In fact, study after study has demonstrated that when more homeowners are known to be armed, “hot burglaries” — the kind initiated when there are people home –- drop dramatically. Britain is a country where illegal AK-47s are now so common that the tabloids’ new nickname for blue-collar Manchester is “Gunchester” (no matter how often Barack Obama insists no nation but America is “awash in guns.”) So when Britain recently banned handguns among the law-abiding, “hot” burglaries skyrocketed, with all the accompanying risks to the safety of the terrified citizenry.

Economist and political philosopher Thomas Sowell, the brilliant Rose and Milton Friedman Senior Fellow The Hoover Institution at Stanford University, wrote a syndicated column back in 2013 in which he ridiculed those “people who have never fired a shot in their life (but) who do not hesitate to declare how many bullets should be the limit to put into a firearm’s clip or magazine.

“Virtually all gun control advocates say that 30 bullets in a magazine is far too many for self-defense or hunting — even if they have never gone hunting and never had to defend themselves with a gun,” Mr. Sowell wrote. “Anyone who faces three home invaders . . . might find 30 bullets barely adequate. After all, not every bullet hits, even at close range, and not every hit incapacitates. You can get killed by a wounded man.

These realities have been “ignored for years by people who go ballistic when they hear about how many shots were fired by the police in some encounter with a criminal.”

ARMED ROBBERIES SKYROCKETED

What’s that? Why should we listen to some pencil-necked college professor with no real-world experience?

“As someone who once taught pistol shooting in the Marine Corps,” Professor Sowell continues, “I am not the least bit surprised by the number of shots fired. I have seen people miss a stationary target at close range, even in the safety and calm of a pistol range.

“We cannot expect everybody to know that. But we can expect them . . . to stop spouting off about life-and-death issues when they don’t have the facts. The central question as to whether gun control laws save lives or cost lives has generated many factual studies over the years,” Mr. Sowell continues. “Most factual studies show no reduction in gun crimes, including murder, under gun control laws. A significant number of studies show higher rates of murder and other gun crimes under gun control laws.”

(Look up the work of Gary Kleck, John Lott, and Don Kates, just for starters.)

“How can this be?” Mr. Sowell asks. “It seems obvious to some gun control zealots that, if no one had guns, there would be fewer armed robberies and fewer people shot to death.

“But nothing is easier than to disarm peaceful, law-abiding people,” Professor Sowell observes, “and nothing is harder than to disarm people who are neither — especially in a country with hundreds of millions of guns already out there, that are not going to rust away for centuries.

When it was legal to buy a shotgun in London in the middle of the 20th century, Mr. Sowell points out, there were very few armed robberies there. “But, after British gun control zealots managed over the years to disarm virtually the entire law-abiding population, armed robberies became literally a hundred times more common. And murder rates rose. . . .

“The great bulk of the studies show that gun control laws . . . on net balance, do not save lives but cost lives. . . .”

In fact, far from seeing their streets erupt into modern-day versions of the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, many states that have switched to constitutional carry in recent years have seen decreases in crime.

“In the three states that have adopted permitless carry laws similar to Kansas’ law, murder rates have gone down; declining by 23 percent in Alaska, 16 percent in Arizona, and eight percent in Wyoming,” reported Chris W. Cox, executive director of the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, this spring.

Still, Democrats seem determined to identify themselves as the party that wants to keep its own voters disarmed and helpless. This spring, Montana and West Virginia lawmakers gave their final seal of approval to measures that would have brought constitutional carry to those states, “only to meet with vetoes from Democratic governors who cited safety concerns as a reason to torpedo the reforms,” reports Chris Eger at www.guns.com/2015/04/03/kansas-becomes-the-6th-constitutional-carry-state.

Whose safety?

Vin Suprynowicz, former award-winning editorial writer for the Las Vegas Review-Journal, is the author of “Send in the Waco Killers”; a new novel about the War on Drugs, “The Testament of James,” and the forthcoming sequel, “The Miskatonic Manuscript.” A version of this column appears in the July 10 edition of “Shotgun News.”