Some Common Sense from Wisconsin’s Attorney General

While I’m not keen on Wisconsin’s rule requiring four hours of training before a person can exercise their Constitutionally guaranteed right to bear arms, it’s still not as bad of a system as it could have been. It’s also good to hear some common sense come from Attorney General Van Hollen:

Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen said Thursday he would be comfortable with allowing people to carry guns in the Capitol and other state buildings.

“I don’t have a problem with it, but I’m not going to have a say in that,” the Republican attorney general said in an interview.

“One of the oldest arguments out there is that the criminals – the ones who aren’t entitled to have firearms – are carrying concealed already,” he added. “They’re the ones we’re worried about, not the ones who are going to be abiding by the law.”

There is no danger in a person like myself carrying a firearm into any building. I’m a peaceful person who will only use violence in response to somebody initiating violence against myself. Regardless of what the anti-gunners think the majority of people are in the same boat as me, if it were otherwise we wouldn’t have a functioning society. Sadly there are violent individuals in our society and the best way for us peaceful citizens to defend ourselves against such scourge is by having a proper self-defense tool available to us.

We’re not the ones who law enforcement officers should be concerning themselves with. If law enforcement are concerned with criminals carrying firearms into the Capitol building they can do what Texas does and install metal detectors but allowing those with permit to bypass the security as they’ve already been checked out through a background check and are known to be free of violent crime.

This year saw massive protests at the Capitol as Republicans who run the Legislature debated and passed a new law that eliminated most collective bargaining for most public workers. Van Hollen said those demonstrations did not change his opinion on whether people should be allowed to carry guns in the Capitol.

“Any one of them could have been carrying a firearm without our knowledge already had they wanted to do so,” Van Hollen said.

Van Hollen seems to understand a fact most anti-gunners fail to grasp, bad people will do bad things regardless of the laws put into place telling them they can’t. A statute passed by some politicians isn’t going to stop a violent criminal from performing a violent act.

“I’m a proponent of concealed carry for law-abiding citizens because I don’t believe there has been a redeeming argument or evidence of the government (needing) to interfere in our lives in that category because there’s just not this pile of anecdotal cases where law-abiding citizens are abusing firearms to the detriment of the public,” Van Hollen said. “So I don’t know that there’s a problem to protect ourselves from.”

This is where the anti-gunners have failed to make a case; they’ve been crying that there will be blood in the streets if carry laws are loosened but so far there hasn’t been any evidence supporting their claim.