Snaking its way through the Ohio Senate is HB 227 the Constitutional Carry bill. HB 227 will allow any citizen over 21 who meets certain, simple baseline qualifications to carry a concealed weapon without any training or permit. Stand your ground meets Red Dawn. It removes the onerous 8 hours of training to qualify for a concealed carry permit, during which you aren’t even required to prove you are able to hit a target.
Traveling alongside HB 227 is an equally alarming, though much more pointed HB 425 which would remove the “duty to inform.” A simple law that requires a person to tell law enforcement officers they are carrying a weapon. The new law requires the officer to ask if you are carrying a concealed weapon, or it’s your little secret.
State Representative Scott Wiggam (Republican, Wayne County) believes “officers are trained to suspect that somebody may be armed. In fact, if they’re not, then that’s a shame… because bad guys never tell police they’re armed.” Somehow, the reasoning conjures two distinctly unreasonable, awful conclusions.
The first assumption, police should approach every situation assuming they are dealing with a “bad guy.” Right now in the city where I live they are trying to find a new chief of police. It has been narrowed to four candidates, and they all approach the question of procedure with the same basic answer; it’s not about enforcement, it’s about engagement.
Police shouldn’t approach every situation thinking they’re going to need to use “deadly force.” Most people seem to believe that hasn’t worked out very well so far. See Black Lives Matter.
The second assumption, bad guys will be more willing to tell police officers they have a gun if asked.
I’m not sure which is more ridiculous.
Either way, this movement toward a more heavily armed, bellicose society is troubling. What are we so afraid of? The only answer I can come up with is each other. And I guess that makes sense considering how quickly we are rushing toward a society armed to the teeth and waiting for a chance to practice a little state-approved vigilante-style self-defense.
I would like to see a bill come up for a vote requiring everybody to smile at a stranger. It would make everybody a lot happier if we could make kindness a mandate. It would save a lot of lives if we could make tolerance a law.
What if we could stop all the incessant whining about individual liberties and recognize we are part of larger group with responsibilities toward the whole? What if we could engineer a world where people, all people, felt carrying a gun was foolish, expensive and dangerous?
Nah, that’s too crazy. It will never work.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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