Friday, July 12, 2013

Chapman gets the P word wrong on Illinois conceal and carry law

Chicago Tribune pundit Steve Chapman got the P word wrong in his July 11 piece "Pols miss the point on conceal carry". It's not the pols who miss the point on conceal carry, its the pundits.

A couple of points Chapman either mis represented or totally missed:

1. Chicago Dems, led by Gov. Quinn and his spot on, courageous amendatory veto of Illinois conceal carry overridden by legislators beholden to the NRA, don't believe conceal carry "will unleash mass carnage". Chapman is making that up.
2. Nor do they believe amending the NRA driven bill will stop the roughly 5 shootings every day in Chicago.
3. Nor were they trying to prevent carry conceal in Illinois in that they recognize it's the
law of the land as determined by the Supreme Court in general and the US Appeals Court concerning Illinois' now defunct ban on conceal carry.

They simply wanted a bad bill amended to incorporate the nine, let me repeat, nine changes that would have made conceal carry less of a safety issue on Chicago streets already  awash with gallons of blood from 2,000 annual shootings. Chapman, like the recent Trib editorial, just mentioned a couple of objections and then moved on without any comment about their critical importance to implementing a sane conceal carry bill. Not recognizing even one of the nine amendment requests as being worthy of implementation is simply irresponsible commentary by an influential pundit and the "World's Greatest Newspaper".

The amendatory veto, in reducing the number of guns that could be concealed in public and limiting the places they could be carried into, shines a spotlight on our out of control gun culture that has poured 300,000,000 guns into our streets and homes, resulting in tens of thousands of gun deaths yearly. Neither Chapman nor the Trib addresses this issue which is the cause of those deaths, much more than simply "criminals and juveniles". Growing up in 1950's Chicago, I observed the same amount of juvenile crime but very few shootings simply because guns weren't available. The easy availability and access to guns is what distinguishes America from every other industrialized country, none of which comes anywhere close to us in gun carnage. U.S.A. is No. 1, all right.

The NRA is not primarily a gun owners lobbying group. Their single client is the gun and ammo manufacturers whose stock rises with every mass shooting, every Trib article about 1,000 Chicago shootings in six months, and yes, every conceal carry law their shills in the NRA write for cowardly legislators to pass with support from clueless pundits and newspaper editorial boards.     

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