Does the Houston Chronicle Editorial Board get tired of hearing the same songs over and over on the radio? Whatever the answer may be, they certainly haven't tired of singing the same old song on their editorial page...
...The Legislature just passed a bill that expands a resident's right to use a firearm in self-defense at home, in vehicles and at other locations. The legislation would establish a legal presumption of self-defense for the shooter. After overwhelming approval by the House and Senate, the governor signed it.
Another bill moving through the Legislature would allow workers to keep licensed guns in their cars, even if they are parked at workplaces where their employer bans firearms. A third bill would make concealed handgun license records confidential. The records, owned by the public that paid for their creation, are properly classed as public documents.
These bills, should they become law, would encourage the proliferation of deadly weapons into every area of our lives, from the freeway to the shopping mall. Instead of putting the brakes on bad legislation, Perry's latest comments only fuel the domestic arms race.
Arming the public to the teeth will not prevent individuals like Virginia Tech student Seung-Hui Cho from murdering innocents taken by surprise and terrorizing a campus. He bought his killing tools legally and probably could have qualified for a concealed handgun permit in Texas.
Rather, guns in every classroom, car and bar would only make it easier for deadly weapons to find their way into the wrong hands. The odds that an armed population could quickly take down a deranged gunman are much smaller than the chance of being shot by an otherwise law-abiding citizen who becomes emotional and loses control in a stressful public setting.
Sigh. The same old blood-running-in-the-streets rhetoric trotted out by the Brady enuretics every time citizens' rights of self-defense are even proposed to be expanded to the level they should have been in the first place. It gets tiring, and it's quite insulting to boot. With the way the system is, I'd be willing to bet that at least a few CHL holders in Texas get ticked off every day about one thing or another, yet they leave the guns in the holsters, judging by the fact that these stories about innocents being shot by CHL holders who lost control of their emotions NEVER make it to newsprint. Why, it's almost as if the Chron editorialists were talking out of their collective asses! Which, really isn't surprising because, as I heard someone say once, "When you talk out of your ass, a lot of shit's gonna come out." Pardon my french, but this sort of thing just gets really tiring. Let's hope Perry and the Legislature don't listen to the media, and that they put these bills through. When it's all said and done, it's absolutely the only moral and right thing to do.
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