New Year's Message to Iowa Legislators

December 2002

The great majority of Iowa Legislators and Legislative leaders respect and support the 2nd Amendment.  With the Legislative session upon us, I am sure you are going to be inundated with requests for money and new laws.  Iowa’s one million gun owners and hundreds of thousands of hunters don’t want a handout, but we do have some issues of concern.

During the Clinton years, the technique of employing government agencies in the organized program to ban guns was perfected and spread to state government.  The simple formula is: inflict new red tape, impose new cost and restrict access to shooting and hunting areas.

The immediate purpose is to annoy gun owners and cause many to drop out.  In America there are about 100 million gun owners.  In Iowa about a million.  That’s too powerful a political force to overcome.  By making gun ownership and use more difficult, more expensive and by closing hunting and shooting lands; it was thought gun owner numbers could be driven down. 

These anti-gun laws and administrative rules are always proposed and supported by persons with long and clear public records of working to ban guns.  In other words when the drum-beater is anti-gun the proposal is anti-gun.

Like with any swindle, there is always a nice sounding excuse attached to the anti-gun proposal. The excuse is most often crime or safety, and safety is often falsely connected with- the children.  

Please consider the following issues that are of importance to Iowa gun owners.

 

CRIME:

Iowa has huge gun ownership – perhaps a million gun owners.  Yet relative to places like Washington D.C. - which has very low gun ownership – Iowa has practically no crime.    Clearly, the presence of a gun does not lead to crime.

 

PRISONS:

A new drumbeat is being heard- to start letting more crooks out of prison faster.  We are absolutely opposed to releasing criminals from prison through absurd social schemes that allow the crooks to prey on new victims.  Early release is the wrong thing to do. Law-abiding gun owners are tired of being blamed for the acts of crooks who would have been in prison on the day of their new crime – if they had served their previous sentence.   If criminals are released from prison they will commit new crimes using knives, cars, pens, fire, pry bars, and guns. We hope no one will blame law-abiding owners of any of those objects.

 

SAFETY:

Since guns rarely wear out and about 4 million a year are sold,  there are obviously many more guns and gun owners than ever before.  The fact is that gun accidents, whether hunting or otherwise, are at an all-time low.

 

CHILDREN:

Children are defined as 14 and under.  The fact is that in Iowa, the number of children 14 and under, killed each year in gun accidents is either zero or one!  The anti-gun people regularly lie to the public about these numbers.  No government program imposed on a population of three million, will reduce gun accidents from one a year -  to zero. We hope that the Legislature will demand accurate data and facts if such matters are debated.

 

HUNTING:

Hunting is very vulnerable to destruction by the thousand cuts of creeping red tape, cost and access restrictions.  This is always driven by government agencies either intentionally or through bureaucratic arrogance.  The result is the same-make it harder to hunt, practice or get a license –  hunters will drop out. Create complicated paperwork and annoying little errands for hunters to run – hunters will drop out. Create an unfriendly and threatening atmosphere with constant threats of citation and arrest for minor paperwork missteps, hunters will drop out.

The danger is not that highly motivated hunters who often belong to hunter specialty or booster groups will leave the field. Probably the wealthy hunter with a secretary or aide to help with the red tape and a club to practice at will stay in for a while.  

The backbone of hunting however, is the hunter who punches a time-clock.  The woman who works at a convenience store on a second job. The truck driver who is out of state most of the week while the government offices are conveniently open.  The kid struggling to find time to attend hunter safety classes. These folks are the big numbers among the 2 to 3 hundred thousand Iowa hunters. 

The key question is, how does new red tape, arrogance and increasing cost impact them?

HUNTING BOATS:

Many hunters in Iowa use boats and they have an excellent safely record with those boats. It is not necessary to impose boat drivers licensing or new age restrictions on the use of boats by hunters – regardless of what nice sounding name sugar-coats those rules.  

DEER:

There are huge numbers of deer in Iowa.  We are a very long way from the point where the deer will be driven to extinction because we pass out more licenses, regardless of what scheme we use. Farmers need some relief.  Without adding endless red tape, more licenses should be issued.

GUN SHOWS:

Hundreds of thousands of Iowans go to gun shows every year.  They include, Legislators, Congressmen, Senators, preachers, school teachers, Mayors and farmers. There is no evidence that criminals are buying guns at Iowa gun shows.  There are NO gun show loopholes. The exact same laws and regulations apply to a citizen selling a gun at a gun show as if he sold it at his home.  The exact same laws apply to a dealer, whether he sells a gun at a gun show or at his store.

BALLISTIC IMAGING:

The latest anti-gun gimmick is the misuse of ballistic imaging.  Ballistic imaging works fine when police recover a bullet or a casing, at a crime scene and use the equipment to compare it with bullets from other crimes or cartridges fired by guns taken from criminals.  The gun-ban crowd now wants to turn these systems into massive gun registration, wherein guns never used in crime would be registered. That produces two major problems.

First, way over 99.9% of guns are never used in crime. The system will be polluted with millions of non-crime gun images that will have to be computer searched every time.  This will produce thousands of “possible matches” each of which will have to be hand evaluated in person by a technician. No agency has that many technicians.

Second, every crook will quickly realize that it is very easy to modify the gun barrel and other parts, so that any previously “imaged” bullets or casings will no longer match the gun.  This can be done in minutes by an unskilled person, using commonly available materials.

The gun-ban crowd doesn’t care, because for them the crook is not the target.  Registering and eventually confiscating the guns of the 99.9% of law-abiding people is their goal.

We support using ballistic imaging systems on crime guns, bullets and casings.  We oppose turning them into massive registration schemes aimed at law abiding Iowans.