Armed Iowa, one year later

Happy Birthday. One year ago yesterday, "shall-issue" became Iowa law. You've read of  the resultant carnage, so there's no need to repeat it here.

Our largest newspaper -- the anti-gun Des Moines Register* --  decided it needed a year-end retrospective and produced what was presumably the most horrifying summary it could print without generating a collective horse laugh from the Mississippi to the Missouri. It headlined the "Unbelievable" number of new ccw permits in 2011.

Turns out the unbelievability head is based on this quotation:

“ 'It’s unbelievable,' (Cerro Gordo Sheriff Kenneth Pals) said. 'It hasn’t slowed. The permits used to be one-year permits. Now they are good for five years'.”

But try as it might, the Register couldn't dredge up enough to cite even one case of a CCW holder misusing a weapon. (I found one early in the year. Some CCW guy got  tight and waved his piece around in a bar. He's now, rightfully, a former CCW holder. That's all the mayhem I could find, so I suppose shall-issue hasn't  stacked corpses in our schools, orphanages, and  Burger Chef's.)

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And then there's the nation's Capital where they store, but rarely read, the Constitution, where gore was to clog the sewers after the Heller decision a little more than two years ago. Err, the  Washington murder rate is down.

If you decide to read that report you may savor the reasons given by Mayor Gray and Police Chief Lanier. They explain that homicides fell because of the excellent work of Mayor Gray and Police Chief Lanier. I'm sure that's true because there is no possibility that armed thugs might think twice about  throwing down on a victim who might shoot back.


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*I rag on the Register quite often, sometimes unairly so.  I found its coverage of the shall-issue debate last year pretty objective, and I can find little to fault in its news coverage of the Ron Paul campaign