Yesterday I posted a good article that related to Minnesota’s own “gun show loophole” that isn’t a loophole. Something has been eating at me about that article, namely this:
Paymar has never fired a handgun, nor has he ever attended a gun show. He was moved to act, he says, after seeing a YouTube clip. In it, Colin Goddard, a Virginia Tech massacre survivor who was shot four times, attends gun shows and successfully buys firearms without undergoing a background check or even being asked to show identification.
I touched on it briefly in yesterday’s post but it’s something that has bugged me about government forever. Why do we find it acceptable to allow people with no knowledge or experience in a field to legislate that field? Paymar isn’t the only example. Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens we put in charge of Internet regulation even though he obviously had no knowledge in the field.
This seems to be a common thing with government. We find the most incompetent people and let them be in charge of something. This kind of incompetence doesn’t fly anywhere else but government (normally). Generally if you’re put in charge of something at a company it’s because you portrayed some kind of competence in the area of concern. If you’re not competent you are eventually fired.
But here Paymar has never been to a gun show in his life yet he feels justified in creating legislation that would affect gun shows. Now his bill was shot down in committee thankfully but he’s vowed to reintroduce the bill at a later time. This raises the question, what the Hell is he thinking? He can’t claim it’s to get voter favor since the bill doesn’t seem to have much traction here in Minnesota. The only people who really seem to care are us pro-gunners and the anti-gunners who generally don’t know what they’re talking about.
We shouldn’t stand for this. Instead we should demand that in order to legislate something the person writing the law much either have direct experience with the topic or have hired independent consultants who have said experience.