In large ads published in Wednesday’s Denver Post and Boulder Camera, Tom Mauser, the father of one of the students killed in the 1999 Columbine High School shootings, takes Colorado’s Democratic Sens. Mark Udall and Michael Bennet to task for voting last week in support of the Thune amendment, which would have forced states to honor the concealed-carry permits issued by other states, even in cases when host-state laws would otherwise prevent the visiting gun owners from carrying firearms.

Both Udall and Bennet defended those votes in the local press by pointing out that Colorado already honors the right-to-carry permits of 27 other states. Udall issued a statement arguing that the Thune bill wouldn’t “raise the risk of unlawful gun smuggling or other criminal acts.” And Bennet’s statement reasoned that “any concealed-carry permit holder from another state must follow our criminal statutes, and that would have remained the law if the Thune amendment had passed.”

Critics of the Thune amendment, however, weren’t attacking the proposal on the grounds that it would have trumped state criminal law as to where or how a visitor could carry a weapon. (Bennet is right — it would not have). Rather, they were concerned because Thune’s bill would have trumped some state restrictions over whom could carry a firearm.

Mauser lays out how Thune would have scrapped some of Colorado’s eligibility laws. For example, Colorado law prevents anyone under the age of 21 from carrying a concealed weapon — a restriction that applies even to residents of the 27 states whose permits Colorado recognizes. But under Thune, Mauser notes, “18 year olds from out of state would have been able to carry a concealed weapon in our state, against our legislature’s express wishes.”

Mauser also points out that:

In Colorado, people convicted of serious juvenile offenses and certain misdemeanor crimes cannot possess or carry a gun. This is true even if they have a concealed carry permit from a state that has reciprocity with Colorado. The Thune Amendment would have overridden these Colorado laws and let serious juvenile offenders or dangerous misdemeanants legally possess firearms in our state.

“Senator Bennet and Senator Udall, did you take the time to understand the effects of the Thune Amendment?” Mauser asks.

Not that Udall and Bennet were the only Democrats to support the bill. Twenty Democrats voted in favor of the proposal, including three who cosponsored the measure. Some didn’t much like talking about their support. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), for example, told reporters the day before the vote that he would support the bill. But asked to explain his position, Reid, who faces a tough reelection contest next year, bristled. “You asked me how I’m going to vote and I just told you. I’m not going to explain why I’m voting,” he said.

Such statements don’t help to dispel the accusations that many lawmakers are voting in fear of retribution from the powerful gun lobby, rather than in the best interests of their constituents.

“Colorado deserves Senators who will respect our state’s sovereignty and ability to make decisions about the safety of its citizens,” Mauser wrote. “We deserve Senators who will disregard special interests, and instead vote in the state’s interest.”

Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) (WDCpix)

In the year’s first high-profile legislative setback for the gun lobby, the Senate on Wednesday shot down legislation to scrap state and local laws dictating who can carry concealed firearms.

The vote marks a rare victory for gun reformers, including President Obama, who have had little success battling the powerful National Rifle Association this year despite commanding Democratic majorities in both the House and Senate.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The legislation, sponsored by Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), would have forced states to honor concealed weapon permits issued by other states, even in cases when local laws would prohibit the visiting gun owner from carrying firearms in public. Hardly a partisan issue, the measure highlighted the chasm between lawmakers from the less populous rural regions, where gun rights are sacrosanct, and those representing the more urban coastal states, where higher population densities and crime rates have led local governments to enact stricter limits on concealed-carry eligibility.

The count in the Senate was 58 to 39 — two votes shy of the 60 needed to defeat the filibuster led by liberal Democrats. Twenty Democrats, including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.), joined almost every Republican in supporting the bill. Sens. George Voinovich (Ohio) and Richard Lugar (Ind.) were the only Republicans to oppose the measure.

Under Thune’s proposal, gun owners granted the right to carry concealed weapons publicly in their home state would retain that right when traveling across state lines, provided that they comply with the other concealed-carry laws of the host state, such as restrictions on where guns can be carried. The rule would not have applied in Illinois, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia, the only jurisdictions that prohibit concealed carry altogether. The bill, Thune said on the Senate floor before the vote, would “allow law-abiding people to protect themselves from criminals when they travel across state lines.”

But in their successful opposition push, most Democrats maintained that the proposal would deny the rights of states and municipalities to set their own concealed-carry eligibility requirements based on local conditions. New York City, for example, with a population of 8.4 million, has different concerns about who can carry guns than the state of Vermont, with a population of 621,000, opponents argued. Indeed, every gun owner in Vermont has the automatic right to carry their firearm in public, while New York statutes empower law enforcers to deny concealed-carry permits on a discretionary basis. Yet under the Thune bill, those eligible to conceal firearms in the Green Mountain State could also carry them in Manhattan.

Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) said Thune’s bill would “impose the lowest common denominator” for concealed-carry eligibility on all states and municipalities. “This is probably the most dangerous piece of legislation to the safety of Americans when it comes to guns since the repeal of the assault weapons ban,” Schumer said just before Wednesday’s vote.

Scott Knight, chief of police in Chaska, Minn., who also chairs the Firearms Committee of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, echoed that message. Minnesota law, Knight said, bars those convicted of domestic and substance abuse from getting concealed-carry permits. Yet the Thune proposal would have allowed gun owners from states without those prohibitions to carry firearms down the streets of Minnesota with impunity.

Of importance, the Thune bill would not have overridden state laws dictating how or where gun owners could carry weapons, but only who. Arizona, for example, just passed a state law allowing concealed loaded weapons in bars. The Thune bill, however, wouldn’t allow Arizona residents to carry their guns into bars in states where the practice is prohibited.

Supporters of the Thune bill disputed the claims that the measure would empower criminals. “Of all the people we need to worry about committing gun crimes and violence unlawfully, the people with a conceal-carry permit are probably the last on the list,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.).

Ironically, the Thune amendment put many state-rights defenders in the odd position of stealing the powers of local governments to regulate themselves. Republicans, generally known for insulating states from the reach of Washington, took the opposite tack in Wednesday’s vote, effectively voting to eliminate the rights of states to decide what’s best for their own residents on the issue of gun reform. “It’s an attack on states rights by people who usually support states rights,” said Daniel Vice, senior attorney with the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

The NRA did not return calls for comment. But the group shot out a statement immediately after the vote lauding the 58 lawmakers who supported the bill, even as that number fell two members shy of passing the bill. “The vote shows that a bipartisan majority agrees with the NRA,” said NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris W. Cox.

The gun-reform issue has been a tough nut to crack for the young White House. President Obama ran on a platform of controversial gun reforms, including the return of the assault weapons ban, only to discover that Washington’s political climate is hardly suitable to cultivate those proposals. Indeed, with the Democrats picking up many of their new seats in conservative-leaning districts, even House passage of tighter gun controls has been a political impossibility.

Instead, the NRA has gained ground. In May, Obama was forced to sign a bill, attached to a larger credit card reform proposal, allowing concealed weapons in national parks. And legislation scrapping most of Washington, D.C.’s strict gun control laws — attached to a bill granting D.C. a voting Congress member — has stymied House Democratic leaders, who want to pass the underlying bill but not the gun amendment. As a result, the bill has sat idle for most of the year.

On Tuesday, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) rejected a suggestion that the DC-vote bill is dead for the year. “It is still on my front burner,” Hoyer said. Still, he didn’t offer any suggestions about how the Democrats might push it through without swallowing the gun amendment.

Situations like that trouble public safety experts, who say the gun lobby’s sway at election-time forces lawmakers to vote with the NRA above the well-being of their constituents.

“It’s a pure and over-simplistic political apporach,” said Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University. “Regardless of what the policy is, [politicians feel] it’s safest not to be anti-gun … It’s hard to justify a lot of those votes.”

Courtesy of: pinkpistols.org and olegvolk.net

One month after successfully tucking an amendment into the credit card reform bill that expanded gun rights, a small number of Senate Republicans are looking at the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act as another chance to score a victory for the Second Amendment. The possible plan — to add an amendment that would allow gun owners to carry their weapons from one state to another in accordance with concealed carry laws. The possible rationale — to defend gay rights.

“It makes sense for a group of people who would be protected by hate crime legislation to support something that would let them defend themselves before or after the crime,” said one Republican Senate aid familiar with the discussions. “It’s relevant, and we want to work together with gay groups to get the message out.”

Image by: Matt Mahurin

While the aide described the discussions over a gun rights amendment to the hate crimes bill as “very fluid,” conservative and pro-gun rights gay groups outside of the Senate are ready to make a real push for it. GOProud, a new gay rights group that broke away from the Log Cabin Republicans in April, has talked with top staffers for Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) and Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) about how to make the civil rights case for conceal and carry reciprocity.

“We support this because we think it’s advantageous to make it legal and relatively easy for gay people to arm themselves so they can protect themselves,” said Jimmy LaSilva, who became the executive director of GOProud after three years working on policy for the Log Cabin Republicans. “In the next few weeks we want to start highlighting some of those stories. There are people who have averted gay bashings because of their ability to use guns.”

LaSilva and GOProud are currently putting together the names of some of those people. They’re collecting their statements for the first rock-solid deadline in the push for concealed carry reciprocity — a June 23 hearing that came together as a result of a previous Thune gun rights bill. In February, Thune and Sen. John Ensign (R-Nev.) offered similar amendments to legislation that would extend a vote in Congress to residents of Washington, D.C. Both amendments would have legalized gun ownership in the district. Ensign’s passed, and Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) approached Thune on the floor to offer a hearing on conceal and carry reciprocity instead of a protracted fight on his D.C. gun rights amendment.

“Everyone here is focused on that hearing,” said Kyle Downey, a spokesman for Thune. “It’s too early to talk about the chances of this as a separate bill or as an amendment, but getting the commitment from Leahy on a hearing was quite a victory in and of itself.”

The hate crimes bill was sponsored by Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and is supported by a range of minority rights groups. The senator’s office and the gay rights group Human Rights Campaign did not comment on this potential amendment when contacted by TWI.

Liberal opponents of Coburn and other Republicans criticized last month’s amendment to the credit card bill that legalized the possession of loaded weapons in national parks. The National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups pushed back hard against the argument that Coburn’s amendment had been irrelevant, or that it had been passed as a trick. At the time, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence called the amendment “reckless and extraneous,” while NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre argued that the vote was bipartisan and proved “there is broad and bipartisan support for the Second Amendment in Congress.”

Supporters of concealed carry reciprocity argue that the case for attaching it to a hate crimes bill — if that is the way that it can be passed — makes even more sense than the case for Coburn’s amendment. “Plenty of people have used guns to defend innocent people,” argued Second Amendment scholar and attorney David Kopel, “including crimes motivated by bias. This is a legitimate thing to attach to any bill that’s concerned with violent crime.”

Courtesy of: pinkpistols.org and olegvolk.net

That’s the case being made by Pink Pistols, a gay gun rights organization whose slogan is “Armed Gays Don’t Get Bashed,” and whose members can recount stories of fending off potential attackers by brandishing their weapons.

“Self-defense with a firearm is a valid and viable method of self-defense and protection,” said Gwen Patton, a spokesperson for Pink Pistols. “Imagine that individuals follow you from a place known in the neighborhood as a GLBT gathering place. They follow you to your car, and when you try to open the door, they hold out pipes and yell — ‘Hey, faggot!’ You pull out a concealed weapon that you have a license to carry. They say, ‘He’s got a gun!’ They drop their pipes and run away. No shots were fired, but a beating was just averted.”

Still, it’s not yet clear whether Thune and his allies will have to go this route to pass concealed carry legislation. It’s still possible that a new hate crimes law will be be folded into the defense authorization for 2009, which would effectively remove it from the amendment process. Thune’s most recent version of the legislation, S. 845, still could be introduced on its own for an up-or-down vote. But only one Democrat, Sen. Mark Begich (D-Alaska) has co-sponsored the bill, and Thune’s spokesman Downey worried that “the political side” of the Democratic Party would keep it from coming to a vote. “As we get closer to the election,” said Downey, “they will want to avoid these types of tough votes.”

If they do go the amendment route, supporters of concealed carry reciprocity are confident that it would be passed as part of a hate crimes bill, and not become a poison pill that kills the entire package. “Every Republican senator is on the record with a position on hate crimes legislation,” said GOProud’s LaSilvia. “If this were to be attached, a vote for the bill could be explained as a vote for concealed carry. Gosh — what would happen when the Family Research Council realized that their people were voting for the ‘gay bill?’ It would put a bunch of people in a really weird position. It would be fun to watch.”