Over-riding the Governor’s veto, the Kansas legislature has enacted a “Shall Issue” law for issuing licenses to carry a concealed handgun for lawful protection. Before, Kansas was one of only four states without any provision for issuing concealed handgun licenses. One of the remaining three states, Nebraska, appears poised to enact a similar law, which the Governor has said he will sign.
Kansas is now among the 39 states which have a fair procedure to allow citizens to carry handguns for protection. Along with the three states (Nebraska, Wisconsin, IIllinois) that currently do not issue permits, eight other states issue permits according to the whim of a local official (Hawaii, California, Maryland, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Delaware). A Shall Issue bill is moving through the legislature in Delaware. Rhode Island already has a Shall Issue law, although the law is nullified by administrative practice.
In Wisconsin, a Shall Iissue bill has been vetoed twice, with the vetos sustained by only one or two votes. In every state where Shall Issue proponents have gotten as close as they have in Wisconsin, the state has always eventually enacted a Shall Issue law–although sometimes the process can take a while.
So of the eleven remaining states that are not Shall Issue, two of them (Nebraska and Wisconsin) are nearly certain to change at some point in the future, and there is reasonable possiblity of change in Delaware. All that Rhode Island needs to change is the election of Attorney General who will not interfere with the state law that local goverments must issue carry permits to qualified applicants.
So the number of Shall Issue states could be 43 in the not too distant future. In the seven hold-out states, Shall Issue has passed one body of the legislature at least once in the three largest states: California, New York, and Illinois.
Every year, more and more Shall Issue states create “reciprocity” with each other, so that a person with a permit from her home state can carry her firearm lawfully in a other state while visiting. Currently, a carry permit issued by one state is valid in over half of all states. (See Packing.org for details.)
As the combined total of “no issue” or “whimsical issue” states declines into the single digits, and reciprocity continues to spread, it seems hard to deny that America is concluding that Shall Issue is sensible gun control — one that regulates firearms carrying but does not infringe the right to self-defense.
For more on the Kansas law, see this excellent article in the Wichita Eagle.

Here’s a story about a public health intervention that:

1. Appears to have reduced the rate of sexually transmitted diseases.
2. Especially by encouraging people to have a check-up.
3. Appears to have been fairly inexpensive.
4. Involved no coercion.

The Bay Area Reporter offers a story about a costumed character who promotes sexual disease control (sort of like Smokey the Bear encourages people to prevent forest fires). But the particular costume would scandalize many people. Read the whole article before you make up your own mind.

The opponents of the Assad regime have announced a united front coalition. The expatriate Syrian blogger Ammar Abdulhamid analyzes the coalition, and concludes that, even though the coalition leaders are hardly white knights, the coalition offers the best chance to lead a transition to a post-Assad state that does not degenerate into warlordism.

“Texas has begun sending undercover agents into bars to arrest drinkers for being drunk, a spokeswoman for the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission said,” according to Reuters. Public intoxication is illegal in Texas, and the authorities contend that their preemptive arrests will prevent people from driving drunk or committing other offenses. HT Peaktalk. More: Mar. 31.

According to Forfeiture Endangers American Rights, the U.S. Dept. of Justice is proposing revisions of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure which would facilitate property forfeiture. The FEAR site links to the new draft rules, and to critiiques of those rules.

The Brussels Journal points out the close resemblence between the Arabic word for “Allah” and the logo of the UN Human Rights Commission, which may have been imposed by ” a high-ranking Muslim UN official .” Even if “Allah” is not the official UN Human Rights Commission logo, the UN acts as if it were. Brussels Journals points to “last week’s common declaration signed by EU Foreign Policy Coordinator Javier Solana, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan and Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, the Secretary-General of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC). The three men pledged to rewrite the UN Human Rights Charter to ‘protect the sanctity of religions and the prophets.’”

Cinnamon Stillwell observes International Women’s Day by observing that:

the real radical women in the world go largely unremarked by the feminist movement. Today’s true heroines are those who do battle with the gender apartheid, violence and oppression practiced against women in the Muslim world. There, women face not just phantom infringements to their civil rights and perceived slights to their sensitivities, but threats to their lives.

Read the whole article for an inspiring litany of women putting lives on the line by speaking out against Islamist oppression.

Today’s Times of London reports an employment law claim by a teacher who chair made flatulent noises whenever she moved. The teacher, who resigned her position, is claiming constructive dismissal, and asking for one million Pounds in compensation.

Asked why she did not sort out the problem, she told the tribunal: “It’s a health and safety issue for an employer to ensure you have a comfortable chair.”

A chair that forces a person into bad posture might well be a health and safety issue, but a chair that merely causes embarassment is plainly not a health and safety issue — although the chair should still be replaced.

Students for Sensible Drug Policy and the American Civil Liberties Union have filed a lawsuit alleging that the federal law which denies federal financial aid to any student with a drug law conviction is unconstitutional. Personally, I think the federal law is atrocious, and would vote to repeal it. But I think the prospects for victory in court are very slim. The SSDP press release points out several good policy arguments, but raises only two legal points:

The law punishes individuals twice for the same infraction. Affected students have already been dealt with by the criminal justice system. Taking away their access to education after they’ve already paid their debt to society is unnecessary. This violates the “double jeopardy” clause of the Fifth Amendment.

Commenters are welcome to correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think that the Fifth Amendment has ever been interpretted to prohibit governments from choosing to make persons with criminal convictions ineligible for welfare programs, including student aid for higher education.
Second, SSDP argues:

Putting up roadblocks on the path to education does nothing to solve our nation’s drug and crime problems; it only makes them worse. Forcing students convicted of drug charges to drop out of school makes them more likely to fall into drug abuse or commit crimes (thus becoming costly burdens on the criminal justice system) and less likely to become productive taxpaying citizens (thus reducing the nation’s economic productivity). Congress has no rational basis to attach student aid eligibility to drug convictions, especially since murderers, rapists, burglars, and arsonists can still receive financial aid. This violates the equal protection guarantee of the Fifth Amendment’s “due process” clause.

The first half of the paragraph is really a policy argument. The second half — that it is irrational to deny aid to a person with a misdemeanor marijuana conviction, while giving aid to a person with a felony rape or arson conviction — seems more plausible. In an article in the Journal of Contemporary Law, I have argued for taking the rational basis test seriously. But whether courts will do is uncertain.

John Goodman, of the National Center for Policy Analysis, comments on a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine: “Who is at Greatest Risk for Receiving Poor-quality Health Care?” Contrary to many previous studies, the NEJM study found that, in Goodman’s words:

- Among people who seek care (actually see a doctor), there is virtually no difference in the quality of care received by the insured and uninsured.

- There is also very little difference in the care provided by different types of insurance - Medicaid, managed care, fee-for-service and so forth.

The study is consistent with Dallas-area data reported by Goodman in his book Lives at Risk. Goodman summarizes the implications of the NEJM study:

The entire Medicaid program (at a cost of $1,000 per person for every man, woman and child in the country and a huge crowd out of private insurance) is predicated on the conventional wisdom that being insured matters. Now we know that what really matters is seeing a doctor. Two deterrents are rationing by waiting and physician fees. Both hurdles could be overcome with funded health savings accounts.

Another conventional wisdom is that the uninsured need sky-is-the-limit coverage just like the United Auto Workers. But since the low-income uninsured have few assets to protect, why do people with modest means need such expensive coverage? They don’t. A scaled down plan could give them ample choice of doctors and allow entry into the system for much lower premiums.

I am the Editor of an iinterdisciplinary academic journal, the Journal on Firearms and Public Policy. The Journal is now accepting submissions for its next volume, our 18th year of publication. Some sample issues, in PDF, are here. (We hope eventually to put all volumes on-line.) Because we are interdiscplinary, articles may be written in a variety of academic and citation styles, including law, history, social science, philosophy, and so forth. The JFPP’s circulation is vastly larger than most academic journals. If you would like to submit an article, or send a query about possible submission, please write me at the e-mail link on the lower-left column of my website.

Twelve leading writers from the Muslim world signed the Manifesto of 12: Together Facing a New Totalitarianism:

After having overcome fascism, Nazism, and Stalinism, the world now faces a new global totalitarian threat: Islamism.

We — writers, journalists and public intellectuals — call for resistance to religious totalitarianism.

Instead, we call for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity and secular values worldwide.

The necessity of these universal values has been revealed by events since the publication of the Muhammad drawings in European newspapers. This struggle will not be won by arms, but in the arena of ideas. What we are witnessing is not a clash of civilizations, nor an antagonism of West versus East, but a global struggle between democrats and theocrats.

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The preachers of hate bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a world of inequality. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred.

Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of greater power imbalances: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all others.

To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed people. For that reason, we reject “cultural relativism,” which consists of accepting that Muslim men and women should be deprived of their right to equality and freedom in the name of their cultural traditions.

We refuse to renounce our critical spirit out of fear of being accused of “Islamophobia,” an unfortunate concept that confuses criticism of Islamic practices with the stigmatization of Muslims themselves.

We plead for the universality of free expression, so that a critical spirit may be exercised on every continent, against every abuse and dogma.

We appeal to democrats and free spirits of all countries that our century should be one of enlightenment, not of obscurantism.

Now, the 12 signers are the subjects of a death threat. One of the 12, Irshad Manji, is asking people to come to her website and add their own names to the Manifesto. I just did, and I urge you to do the same.

That’’s the polling question of the day in Canada, on morning television. The story involves an elderly woman in Nova Scotia who suffers from multiple sclerosis and cannot walk. She was receiving health assistance from employees of Northwood Home Care. One morning, the Northwood sent an employee who had never been to the home before. In the home, the worker saw an unloaded hunting rifle, with the safety on, and a trigger lock.

The worker immediately fled the home in fear, because the locked, unloaded rifle was not in a gun cabinet. The elderly woman’s husband is a hunter, whose gun is lawfully registered, but he had forgotten to return the locked, unloaded gun to his gun cabinet.

Northwood Home Care refuses to send employees back to the home. According to a Canadian Press Association report, “The agency said its workers fear for their safety because of the hunting rifles.” (”Rifle kills home care,” Halifax Chronicle Herald, March 21, 2006.)

The health care workers themselves would seem to be in need of mental health treatment. The Northwoods workers plainly suffer from a serious case of hoplophobia. (From the Greek word “hoplo”, meaning “weapon.”)

Just as many normal people dislike spiders, many other normal people dislike guns. A few mentally ill people have such debilitaing fear of spiders (aracnophobia) that their fear impedes their functioning in their daily lives. Similarly, hoplophobes suffer from such extreme and irrational fears of guns that their daily functioning is impaired. A health care worker who refuses to provide health care would obviously be suffering from impairment of her normal daily functioning.

I hope that the publicity surrounding the incident persuades Northwood Home Care (Halifax, N.S.) to resume providing health care to the elderly woman, and also encourages Northwood to seek mental health treatment for the hoplophobics among its employees.

Back in 1987, Florida set off a national trend by enacting a law which allows adults with a clean record, who pass a safety class, to obtain a permit to carry a concealed handgun for lawful defense. Although some states already allowed concealed carry, Florida’s 1987 law led to the concept spreading nationally, so that today 38 states have handgun carry laws similar to Florida’s. Now, a new Florida trend is spreading: “Stand your ground” laws.


Last year, Florida enacted a statute stating that victims of a violent felony attack do not have to retreat from the aggressor (even in a public place), and can use deadly force. Now, Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels has signed a Stand Your Ground law in his state, and the South Dakota legislature has enacted a similar law.

Because most Americans intuitively agree with the principle of self-defense, opponents of the law, such as the Brady Center, have resorted to making silly claims, such as asserting that the laws allow “a person who just feels something bad is going to happen to open fire in public.” A careful look at the Florida model, which I blogged about last year, leads to the conclusion that the Brady Center’s claims are unmerited.

In today’s National Post, Canadian columnist Lorne Gunter reports an interview with John Hicks, the former Webmaster for the Canadian Firearms Centre (CFC). The CFC is the national gun control center, which is supposed to maintain the registry of all rifles and shotguns which was created by the former Liberal government in 1995 legislation. According to Gunter, Hicks “contends that anyone with a home computer, an Internet connection and a little patience can hack into the national firearms database and find out who owns guns, where they live and what makes and models they possess.” The CFC computers are known to have been breached 306 times between 1995 and 2003. The computer registry has cost over half a billion Canadian dollars so far, and still doesn’t work. Gunter reports that last December, the contractor “flew in folks from around Canada with the intention they would stay in Ottawa and do testing for six weeks.” But “After one day, all were sent home because the application crashed over 90 times with over 30 Severity-1 crashes.” The new Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper has promised to abolish the dysfunctional long gun registry, and spend the savings on the police; however, Harper leads a minority government so it is not clear if he will be able to accomplish his objective. A research paper by professor Gary Mauser for the Fraser Institute provides the full story on the long gun registry debacle.