PA Bill Number: HB1472

Title: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contributions ...

Description: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contrib ...

Last Action: Referred to STATE GOVERNMENT

Last Action Date: Apr 22, 2024

more >>

More events

True 'common sense' from an Indiana lawmaker :: 05/25/2015

Gun prohibitionists repeatedly use the “common sense” argument to push their anti-Second Amendment agenda, but an Indiana state representative, writing yesterday in the Indianapolis Star may have trumped them all with a 353-word opinion on concealed carry that should apply to every state.

State Rep. Jim Lucas, a Seymour Republican, noted that he has previously introduced legislation to eliminate licensing requirements for citizens to carry a firearm. And then he laid it out in simple language that anyone can understand, provided they are not so mindlessly entrenched in the no-gun Utopia myth that they’ve abandoned reality.

“Making good people helpless will not make bad people harmless,” Lucas wrote.

Is there something about that observation that people don’t understand? Earlier in his short essay, Lucas had noted, “Once again, we are hearing the same tired rhetoric from those who wish to infringe upon, and even take away, the gun rights of innocent men and women.”

Reflecting what appears to be a national trend — it certainly is here in Washington State and literally anywhere else one keeps track of concealed pistol licenses — Lucas notes, “Applications for concealed carry permits in Indiana continue to explode as hundreds of thousands of Hoosier men and women realize that they are the first line of defense in protecting themselves and loved ones.”

Lucas would never be invited as the keynote speaker to the annual fund raising luncheon sponsored by Evergreen State anti-rights elitists at the Washington Alliance for Gun Responsibility (WAGR). He might say something that would cause them to choke on their salad, as he did in his Indy Star letter: “Those who cannot carry or own a firearm are already prohibited by law from doing so, and I find it wrong and immoral to require innocent Hoosiers who are not prohibited from carrying a firearm to have to apply to the state to prove their innocence.”

He might extoll the virtues of the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act (S 498) recently introduced by Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. In the Lone Start State the other day, a controversy erupted about testimony from a woman who spoke during a hearing on open carry legislation, as reported by Breitbart.com.

The woman was wearing a Moms Demand Action T-shirt, and told about her son’s mental problems and how he had attempted to buy guns at a local gun shop, which refused to sell him a firearm. He then went to another store, she said, and was able to buy “an arsenal of guns.” Then, in September 2013, her son killed his father. It was an emotional conclusion to her remarks.

In her testimony, which begins at about the 33-minute mark in this video and runs for about two-and-one-half minutes, Leslie Ervin failed to mention, however, that the murder weapons were a metal pipe wrench and a knife, a fact reported by the newspapers. Guns evidently had nothing to do with the patricide, and the entire testimony appears only to have been aimed at building emotion against the proposed legislation. It’s also not quite clear what this family tragedy had to do with the carrying of firearms by law-abiding citizens, either.

This is the same kind of misleading commentary one finds in an e-mail sent out Saturday by WAGR over the name of Jane Weiss, whose niece was among the victims of last year’s Santa Barbara killing spree. What the letter said is not entirely accurate: “She was one of six UC Santa Barbara students killed by a deeply disturbed young man with a gun at Isla Vista.”

However, Elliot Rodger killed three of those victims with a knife, and everybody knows it. Sadly, Weiss’ niece was one of those fatally shot by Rodger, who, incidentally, had passed multiple background checks and waiting periods under California law to obtain his three handguns. He used state-mandated 10-round-limit magazines. All of these requirements were pushed by gun control advocates as crime prevention measures and they all failed.

As Indiana’s Rep. Lucas intimated, this sort of emotional rhetoric is aimed at curtailing the exercise of a constitutional right by law-abiding citizens. Anti-gunners would have people believe that the mere exercise of a civil right is tantamount to committing a crime.

If this strategy can work against the Second Amendment, now is a good time for people to wonder what other civil rights might be eroded with the same tactics.

---------------------------------

Got an opinion about this column? Share your thoughts in the "Comments" section below.