Month: December 2009

Follow the link here to see Caleb’s performance, which I thought was pretty good. We know the talking points now for the Brady Campaign, which is that these databases being public is important to be able to weed out people who were erroneously granted permits despite criminals records. Let me say that if this is the Brady Campaign’s primary concern, they should have been the first group to call the Times Herald to convince them not to publish the database.

No one would have objected to the newspaper, or anyone else for that matter, picking through the database and finding people who were erroneously issued carry permits who legitimately were not qualified to have them. It’s going to be a very small number of people who fit that mold, because applicants are already pre-screened for criminal records. The idea that you need to publish the entire database, 99.9% of which are people who are legitimately qualified to have them, is utter hogwash.

Indiana, along with many other states, has had gun permits as public records for a long time. In Indiana’s case, for decades. No one ever complained about it being that way until the Herald Times chose to publish those names. Gun owners are powerful enough to demand that law now be changed. The Bradys, newspapers, and other anti-violence groups have had access to that data for a long time, and could have been going through it looking for people who legitimately had criminal records that disqualified them. But they didn’t, which I think says something about their true motives.

You will notice now that the Brady Campaign no longer gives states grades, and have rather decided just to rank order them. This is likely because they’ve only had real success in a small handful of states. By rank ordering, it can make it seem like the gun control movement has actually been more effective. That must be why the Associated Press says stuff like this:

The availability of guns compounds the problem, criminologists say. But Pennsylvania, the state with the most gun-related officer deaths so far this year, has among the strictest gun laws in the country, according to a ranking by the pro-gun-control Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Other states, like Louisiana, Oklahoma and Kentucky, have very little oversight and had few, if any, officer gun deaths this year.

I guess the AP didn’t notice that Pennsylvania, which is ranked at number ten, has a score of 26 on a 100 point scale. Only the top six score above 50, with even top listed California only earning a 79. Pennsylvania ranks higher than a lot of other states because we restrict private transfers of handguns, and allow the state police to keep a illegal registry records of sale for handguns as well. You can rest assured, however, we are doing our level best to ensure the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania drops precipitously on the Brady List.