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To his credit, Gov. Bill Owens vetoed H.B. 1114, which would have made the names of concealed-weapons permit holders into a state secret.
The permits are issued by sheriffs and police chiefs. Thanks to the governor's veto of a bad bill that passed both houses of the General Assembly, the state public records law will continue to cover the permits.
In the script that most Colorado journalists have
followed since April 20, 1999, the discussion of this law
got portrayed as the Gun Lobby
(supporters of secret
weapon permits) vs. Everybody Else
(opponents
whatever the Gun Lobby was agitating for).
As Bob Ewegen has often pointed out, journalism is
the art of relentless oversimplification.
To some
degree, all attempts to reduce a big and disorderly world
to some marks on paper are gross oversimplifications. The
presumed benefit is clarity, but in this case, the script
obscured more than it illuminated.
When I wrote against this law earlier, I received a fair
amount of correspondence. One asked What is it about
you people and guns? Why are you trying to take away our
rights?
By you people,
I presume the correspondent meant
newspaper columnists,
and there certainly are many
columnists who back the goals of the recent Million Mom
March (the main message I got from march promoter Rosie
O'Donnell is that anyone who can afford to hire personal
bodyguards certainly deserves armed protection, but
everybody else should rely on the police).
But I was not among those trying to disarm anyone. As far as I'm concerned, it's none of my business, or any government's, how many guns you own or how you transport them.
However, I did not write our state constitution. It guarantees an absolute right to keep and bear arms, but explicitly denies any right to carry a concealed weapon. That is a privilege. The legislature has decided that this privilege can be granted by sheriffs and police chiefs.
Under the script, the Gun Lobby wanted these transactions removed from public scrutiny, and indeed, I received such correspondence.
The usual argument was something like this: If people
know I have a concealed-carry permit, then they'll presume
I have guns. Then they can just watch my house, and when
I'm away, they can break in and steal my other guns, and
there will be more bad guys with guns.
I don't know about other parts of Colorado, but around here, you've got about a 90 percent chance of finding one or more firearms in any random house you might break into. Why would a gun-seeking burglar would go to the trouble of checking the concealed-carry permit list, then casing the address until he was sure it was empty (lest he be greeted by an occupant who would almost certainly be armed) before breaking in? Isn't that a lot of work for a burglary, and aren't burglars by definition lazy sorts who prefer to acquire goods by minimizing the amount of work required?
But here the script fails again. The so-called Gun Lobby is not monolithic. I heard from hard-core gun owners who opposed the secrecy law. They wrote that in their counties, sheriffs had at times issued concealed-carry permits only to their cronies, and without the prospect of public exposure of these shenanigans, the discriminatory practice might have continued.
In their view -- and mine, and presumably the governor's -- sheriffs are directly accountable to the voters, and police chiefs are indirectly accountable, through the city council or town board who hired them.
To make informed decisions about their performance in office, we need to know what they do. We are, after all, their employers.
The veto of HB 1114 was not about guns or gun-owners' rights. It was about the general public right to monitor the performance of public officials who act in our name and with our money. Deterring abuse of their discretionary powers is thus in the interest of all citizens, Gun Lobby members or not.
Unfortunately, that doesn't fit the journalistic script of the Gun Lobby vs. Everybody Else, and so the public discussion got misdirected.
There was also some correspondence which suggested that Colorado go the route of Vermont, which has a low crime rate and no restrictions on concealed firearms.
The major problem with that approach lies with the
nature of law enforcement in Colorado. If anybody might be
legally toting a concealed weapon, then the police could
always say we thought he was going for a gun
whenever they killed someone, thereby simplifying the
district attorney's job of clearing the killers.
Some may think this is a good idea, but I am not among them. The prosecutors should strain at least a little when they're whitewashing.
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