Current state of right-to-carry laws. (from: wikipedia.org)
[Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in Riverside, CA’s The Press Enterprise on December 18, 2015.]
When seconds count, the police are only minutes away. The worst terrorist attack on American soil in recent times unfolded two weeks ago, just down the street from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s headquarters. By all accounts the sheriff’s department, San Bernardino police, and other law enforcement responded rapidly and performed admirably. But it wasn’t enough to prevent the deaths of fourteen innocent people, with more injured.
It’s mostly coastal California that lags behind the rest of America in allowing good citizens to discreetly carry self-defense firearms. People in the inland counties get it. California law gives the power to issue concealed carry licenses to local chief law enforcement officers, usually the sheriffs.
(From : calffl.org)
As a result, whether you are allowed your right to self-protection outside your home depends entirely on which California county you reside in. We are fortunate in the Inland Empire to have sheriffs who generally trust the people to exercise this basic right. But if you live in Los Angeles County or the Bay area, you can forget getting a license unless you have the right political connections.
We should never again be in doubt about the need to allow good citizens the right to carry. It was brought home to us in terrifying, vivid reality at the Inland Regional Center, perhaps the last place we could have imagined as a target of extremist terrorism. Other mass shootings (Pearl, Mississippi in 1997; the Appalachian School of Law shooting in 2002; the Colorado Springs New Life Church shooting in 2007, to name a few) were successfully stopped by legally armed citizens on the scene when the shooting started.
By now we have nearly 30 years of solid experience, starting with Florida, of so-called “shall issue” right to carry laws. In 1987 when Florida enacted its shall issue law, some predicted bloodshed in the streets. They feared the Sunshine State would become instead “the Gunshine State” as carry permit holders would have shootouts over minor disputes.
What really happened, though, was a lesson that all the other states have learned from. All but California, that is. Concealed carry permit holders turned out to be some of the most law-abiding and cautious Floridians. And the murder rate, according to criminologist John Lott’s book More Guns, Less Crime (page 139), began to drop off dramatically after the 1987 law was passed.
Three years after Florida’s law was passed, state Rep. Ron Silver, the bill’s leading opponent, was asked by the press if the horrible predictions were coming true. Silver replied, “I’m happy to say they’re not.” (“Concealed Weapons Owners No Trouble,” The Gainesville Sun, Nov. 4, 1990).
And Florida was just the beginning. Since then every one of the states that didn’t have right to carry laws enacted them. They learned from experience that the fears of blood running in the streets and shootouts over parking spaces were unfounded. As Washington County Sheriff Jim Frank was quoted in Minnesota Public Radio News, April 29, 2004, “People said all sorts of bad things were going to happen, and it doesn’t look like that’s happened.”
Statements like these reflect the experience of state and county law enforcement leaders across America describing on the record the remarkable success of right to carry laws in their states.
Are Californians not “everyday citizens”, the same as Floridians? Are Californians less responsible, more evil, or less intelligent than people in Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota, Virginia, and Michigan? Are they any less deserving of the right to protect their families against homicidal fanatics or just ordinary thugs?
California’s system of issuing licenses to carry self-defense firearms is broken. It is easily abused as a way to grant political favors. It arbitrarily denies a basic human right to good Californians—the natural right of self-defense.
California should catch up with the rest of America. We should adopt a right to carry law that requires the government to issue a license to every adult Californian who wants one, barring only violent felons and the dangerously mentally ill. And we should do it before the next terrorist attack.
—Timothy Wheeler, MD is director of Doctors for Responsible Gun Ownership, a project of the Second Amendment Foundation.