In September, the legislature of Missouri opted to override Governor Nixon’s veto of a bill that removed the licensing requirements for Missourians who wished to carry a concealed firearm on their person, among other things. Effective January 1st, 2017, citizens of the state of Missouri may now legally carry a concealed firearm throughout the state without first seeking government permission to do so. Missouri still offers a concealed handgun license which provides additional legal protection, as well as the ability to carry a concealed handgun in all of Missouri’s neighboring states (except for the failed state of Illinois) which- apart from Kansas- do not afford their citizens the same freedom now enjoyed by Missourians.
The bill also removed the legal responsibility for an individual to attempt to flee before using deadly force in defense of his life or to prevent severe bodily harm. In practice, this simply means that crime victims who are forced to use lethal force to defend themselves or their families will be subject to less second-guessing and (pardon the cliché) Monday-morning-quarterbacking from law enforcement and district attorneys. It helps prevent innocent crime victims from being victimized a second time: The first by the criminal, and the second by the legal system. These two changes to the law have induced paroxysms of both rage and terror among leftists around the nation. One particularly egregious example is an editorial published last September in the New York Times by an author who did not deign to attach his name to the piece. While several months old, the arguments are still worth addressing. The title of the editorial is unironically named “Missouri: The Shoot-Me State.”
The piece begins thusly:
In an alarming victory for the gun lobby, Missouri’s Republican-controlled Legislature voted Wednesday to override Gov. Jay Nixon’s veto and enact a wholesale retreat from gun safety in the state.
The opening sentence sets the tone for much of what follows. The veto override is considered “alarming,” and a victory for the nefarious (but undefined) “gun lobby,” which is presumably a euphemism for the NRA. The move is described as a retreat from “gun safety,” which is itself a euphemism for “gun control.” Beginning several years ago, the statists realized that the phrase “gun control” had an entirely negative connotation to it and have instead begun to substitute the phrase “gun safety.” The unspoken implication being, of course, that guns are made more safe when legal, financial, and procedural barriers are placed in the way of citizens who seek to exercise constitutionally protected rights.
The next paragraph is so riddled with hyperbole and errors that it will need to be broken down into its component sentences, and addressed one-by-one.
The law will let citizens carry concealed weapons in public without a state gun permit, criminal background check or firearms training.
The sentence begins with the unspoken assumption that rights are granted by the government, rather than innate and inalienable. The result is the curious use of the word “let,” as if the free men of Missouri are only able to carry arms when permitted to do so by a benevolent regent in Jefferson City. The sentence also carries with it the assumption that state-mandated training should be a requirement for someone who wishes to exercise his rights.
This same author would likely be howling with outrage and disgust if the government sought to require training and a background check in order to exercise rights protected by the First Amendment. That is not to imply that training is unnecessary, or that it should be discouraged. On the contrary! But a training requirement before a man is allowed to bear arms is hardly different than a literacy test for voting.
It strips local law enforcement of its current authority to deny firearms to those guilty of domestic violence and to other high-risk individuals.
Note the intentional deceit and the sleight of hand. Where in the previous sentence the author is speaking of firearms permits, the author now speaks of firearms. There are several layers of dishonesty to address here. First, the new statute has no relationship whatsoever to defining who may legally acquire firearms. None. It is also worth stating that prior to this bill, anyone in Missouri who could legally own a firearm under state and federal law could also legally carry that firearm openly and without a permit in any jurisdiction that did not specifically prohibit it.
Second, local law enforcement does not, and has not since 2007, possessed the statutory authority to deny firearms to anyone in Missouri. Of course, in 1921 when Missouri’s Jim Crow permit requirement to purchase a pistol was written, “high-risk individual” usually meant “negro.” Felons, the mentally ill, and those guilty of domestic violence are prohibited from possessing firearms by both federal law and Missouri statute. The passage of this bill does absolutely nothing to change that, as anyone who has actually read the bill would know.
It should not need to be stated- though it often does- that anyone seeking to purchase a firearm from federal firearms license holder must undergo a background check that is supposed to prevent felons, domestic abusers, and those adjudicated mentally unfit from being able to purchase firearms.
And it establishes a dangerous “stand your ground” standard that will allow gun owners to shoot and claim self-defense based on their own sense of feeling threatened.
Again, fear-mongering and lies. Unlike some states, Missouri’s law only permits the use of deadly force to prevent death, serious injury, or a forcible felony (such as rape). The actual language of the statute says the following:
563.031. 1. A person may, subject to the provisions of subsection 2 of this section, use physical force upon another person when and to the extent he or she reasonably believes such force to be necessary to defend himself or herself or a third person from what he or she reasonably believes to be the use or imminent use of unlawful force by such other person, unless:
(1) The actor was the initial aggressor; except that in such case his or her use of force is nevertheless justifiable provided:
(a) He or she has withdrawn from the encounter and effectively communicated such withdrawal to such other person but the latter persists in continuing the incident by the use or threatened use of unlawful force; or
(b) He or she is a law enforcement officer and as such is an aggressor pursuant to section 563.046; or
(c) The aggressor is justified under some other provision of this chapter or other provision of law;
(2) Under the circumstances as the actor reasonably believes them to be, the person whom he or she seeks to protect would not be justified in using such protective force;
(3) The actor was attempting to commit, committing, or escaping after the commission of a forcible felony.
2. A person shall not use deadly force upon another person under the circumstances specified in subsection 1 of this section unless:
(1) He or she reasonably believes that such deadly force is necessary to protect himself, or herself or her unborn child, or another against death, serious physical injury, or any forcible felony;
(2) Such force is used against a person who unlawfully enters, remains after unlawfully entering, or attempts to unlawfully enter a dwelling, residence, or vehicle lawfully occupied by such person; or
(3) Such force is used against a person who unlawfully enters, remains after unlawfully entering, or attempts to unlawfully enter private property that is owned or leased by an individual, or is occupied by an individual who has been given specific authority by the property owner to occupy the property, claiming a justification of using protective force under this section.
3. A person does not have a duty to retreat:
(1) From a dwelling, residence, or vehicle where the person is not unlawfully entering or unlawfully remaining;
(2) From private property that is owned or leased by such individual; or
(3) If the person is in any other location such person has the right to be.
4. The justification afforded by this section extends to the use of physical restraint as protective force provided that the actor takes all reasonable measures to terminate the restraint as soon as it is reasonable to do so.
5. The defendant shall have the burden of injecting the issue of justification under this section. If a defendant asserts that his or her use of force is described under subdivision (2) of subsection 2 of this section, the burden shall then be on the state to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant did not reasonably believe that the use of such force was necessary to defend against what he or she reasonably believed was the use or imminent use of unlawful force.
In other words, the use of force is not justified based on a single individual’s “own sense of feeling threatened.” The use of force is justified based on the reasonable belief that it is necessary to prevent death, serious injury, or a forcible felony. Reasonable is not defined by the individual, but rather by law enforcement, a district attorney, a grand jury, and eventually a jury of one’s peers.
The measure has drawn no great national attention, but it certainly provides further evidence that gun safety cannot be left to state lawmakers beholden to the gun lobby. Democrats opposed to the Missouri bill called it a “perfect storm” of lowered standards for the use of deadly force and an invitation for people to be armed without responsible controls.
The measure has drawn very little national attention because nearly a dozen other states have already removed permit requirements, and it has been a non-issue. The second part of the sentence, however, is a naked appeal to statism on the part of the author. Observe the insinuation that anyone who opposes his point of view is beholden to shadowy, moneyed interests. Notice how he insists that states cannot be trusted to make laws tailored to their own citizens. He cannot bear the idea that people are allowed to do things that he personally detests, and so insists that the Tenth Amendment and federalism itself must be abolished.
The Democrat who called the bill a “perfect storm” represents part of a city where handguns are already carried without a permit and used irrespective of the law. Had the legislature failed to override the governor’s veto, individuals in Saint Louis would still be carrying firearms without any permit and people would still be getting shot on a regular basis. The only thing these “lowered standards” and lack of “responsible controls” accomplishes is to enable the poor people who live in Saint Louis to defend themselves from the city’s numerous criminals without first having $100 extorted from them by the city (the maximum allowable by law) in addition to the fees associated with training, and provides legal protection for the victim if he ever is forced to use deadly force.
The measure was enacted by the Republicans, despite strong public opposition and warnings about the threat to public safety from the state Police Chiefs Association.
The so-called “strong public opposition” cited by the New York Times is actually a single, intentionally biased poll conducted by a known anti-gun lobbying organization. The poll itself is rife with problems, mostly related to sampling. The sample size was only 861 people, out of over 4,100,000 registered voters according to the most recent data available. The fact that the poll showed Donald Trump leading Hillary Clinton by only 1%, when he actually carried the state by a whopping 19% would imply that Democrats were heavily oversampled for the survey.
Also consider the fact that 10% of the respondents in the survey claimed to have a concealed handgun license, in a state where 171,000 (2%) out of over 6,000,000 people actually have a concealed handgun license. A whopping 40% of the respondents claimed to have a bachelor or graduate degree, when only 26% of the Missouri population has completed post-secondary education. (Unfortunately, people who receive four years of indoctrination are more likely to oppose firearms rights.) This, in a poll where the margin of error is supposedly only 3.3%. Finally, the question regarding firearms permits was worded in such a way as to lead the respondent to a desired answer- a technique known as Push Polling.
There’s little to be said about opposition by the state Police Chiefs Association. Police chiefs are politicians first and foremost, and the police (particularly metropolitan police) have a tendency to think that they’re the only ones trained or special enough to carry guns. (Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary.)
Everytown for Gun Safety, one of the groups fighting the gun lobby, noted that stand your ground laws result in disproportionate harm to communities of color.
Everytown for Gun Safety is a an extremist anti-gun lobbying organization that was created and funded, and run by anti-gun statist, Michael Bloomberg. Like it’s sister organization, Moms Demand Action (in a totally non-pornographic way) Everytown pretends to be a grassroots movement when it is in fact a top-down puppet for millionaire leftists. Astroturf, in the parlance of some. While the truthfulness of a statement exists independently of its speaker, it needs to be understood that Everytown has a reputation for being anything but truthful.
You can read Everytown’s report for yourself. There are numerous problems with how the data is portrayed and presented. For example, the start date for most of their statistics is completely nonsensical, as the incident being used as a reference has nothing to do with so-called Stand Your Ground laws. The claim made by the “study” is that justifiable homicides see a sharp increase in states that have no Duty To Retreat, and a disproportionately high number of those justifiable homicides are of African men. The insinuation made by Everytown is that the laws are inherently racist. For example, the study states:
The researchers found that when white shooters kill black victims, 34% of the resulting homicides are deemed justifiable, while only 3.3% of deaths are ruled justifiable when the shooter is black and the victim is white.
Rebutting the entire study is largely outside of the scope of this particular post, but the narrative being pushed is far from the complete picture. The ugly and unspoken context for the “disproportionate harm to communities of color” suggested by Everytown and uncritically regurgitated by the New York Times is that when it comes to violent crime, Africans are far more likely to victimize Europeans than the other way around. This means that in interracial self-defense cases, the perpetrator is overwhelmingly likely to be African.
Thus, according to Everytown’s own numbers, states which abolish Duty To Retreat laws see a marked increase in the justifiable homicides of Africans who are actively committing violent crimes such as burglary, robbery, and attempted murder. In other words, the new laws provided increased legal protections for victims of crime who were no longer prosecuted for legally defending themselves in a reasonable manner.
Mr. Nixon, a Democrat, vetoed the measure in June, saying it would allow individuals with a criminal record to legally carry a concealed firearm even though they had been, or would have been, denied a permit under the old law’s background check.
Of course, those same individuals are prohibited by both state and federal law from even possessing a firearm. It is difficult to see how the denial of a concealed handgun permit would make any meaningful difference.
Mayors Sly James of Kansas City and Francis Slay of St. Louis warned against restricting the power of the local police to deny guns to those who commit domestic violence. They cited sharp spikes in domestic violence homicides in their cities, and they noted that the police would be left at greater risk by this bill.
Given that domestic violence homicides seem to occur most frequently within the home, the attempt by the leftist mayors of Kansas City and Saint Louis to associate lawful concealed carry with domestic violence homicide does not make a great deal of sense. Again, those who have been convicted of domestic violence are already prohibited by law from purchasing or possessing a firearm. The absence of a permit requirement does literally nothing to make it easier for a prohibited individual to acquire or carry a gun. Doing so is already a crime, with or without a permit. To say otherwise is intentionally dishonest, and the fact that all of these people continue to repeat the same talking-point verbatim implies some level of coordination.
Republican legislative leaders, who cut short debate on the override vote on the last day of the session, were ebullient in overriding a variety of the governor’s vetoes beyond the gun measure, including one that will force voters to show a government photo ID.
Republicans “cut short debate” because there was little time remaining in the veto session, and Democrats were not debating- they were filibustering. As an aside, there is nothing wrong with protecting the integrity of our elections, especially when one considers that around three million votes may have been cast illegally in the 2016 presidential election alone.
Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, a lawmaker from Ferguson, which erupted in protests after the 2014 fatal police shooting of Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, warned that enacting the stand-your-ground standard would mean another “bad Samaritan like Zimmerman.”
Senator Chappelle-Nadal is a radical anti-gun zealot, who has in the past attempted to create a gun registry by forcing parents to register their guns with the local school district. Yes, really.
She’s also not from Ferguson.
She was referring to the shooting death in Florida four years ago of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed black teenager, by George Zimmerman; in that case the judge’s instructions to the jury contained some of the language of the stand your ground law.
Except the Trayvon Martin case had nothing to do with Stand Your Ground. Regardless of one’s feelings about Zimmerman as a person or his actions leading up to the confrontation with Martin, the fact of the matter is that Trayvon Martin’s death was an open-and-shut case of self defense. Zimmerman’s legal defense never invoked “Stand Your Ground” because when you’re on your back with an assailant sitting on your chest, beating your skull into the pavement, there is nowhere to retreat. George Zimmerman was tried and found not-guilty by a jury of his peers.
Missouri is joining 10 other states that loosened gun laws to allow concealed firearms in public without the need for a permit.
This is factually accurate. So?
Federal gun controls still require background checks on buyers, but only at federally licensed dealers.
Which is also factually accurate, but has absolutely nothing to do with concealed handgun permits.
Unfortunately, there is a separate and busy uncontrolled market where buyers at gun shows and on the internet do not have to undergo background checks.
This is mostly false and intentionally misleading. Most sellers at gun shows are FFL holders who will only sell to individuals after completing a background check. It is impossible to buy a firearm on the internet without first having it shipped to an FFL holder and performing a background check. What the author at the New York Times is referring to is private sales. The editors at the New York Times do not believe that you should be allowed to buy, sell, or otherwise dispose of your property in a private transaction between two individuals without first seeking government permission.
Regardless, buying a gun in a parking lot at a gun show is no different than buying a gun from a friend or a coworker. Most of the United States allow such basic expressions of commerce. Even when a private sale is arranged online, (which is what the author deceptively refers to as “internet sales”) the buyer and seller must still meet face-to-face, as in any other private firearms transaction. Even if this became prohibited by a “universal background check” law, the edict would be largely unenforceable in the absence of a mandatory registry.
In the presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton has called for extensive gun safety measures, including a ban on the assault weapons favored by mass shooters, closing background-check loopholes, ending the gun industry’s outrageous protection from civil damage suits and denying guns to risky suspects on the government’s no-fly lists.
In other words, Hillary Clinton supported Australian style gun confiscation, banning popular firearms based entirely upon cosmetic or ergonomic features, a prohibition on private commerce (which would require a national gun registry), allowing a manufacturer to be sued for misuse of its product by a third party, and denying American citizens rights guaranteed by the Second, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments without any due process. No wonder the hag lost.
Donald Trump, endorsed by the National Rifle Association, favors more armed civilians ready to engage in what he calls a defensive “shootout.” This is one of the most pathetic measures yet of his pandering, when he should be leading, on an issue of vital importance to the public.
And this type of hysterical fearmongering and moral panic are why people continue to laugh at the New York Times’ “re-dedication” to honest reporting.
Molon Labe.
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