{"id":610,"date":"2009-12-31T12:13:28","date_gmt":"2009-12-31T16:13:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/?p=610"},"modified":"2009-12-31T12:13:28","modified_gmt":"2009-12-31T16:13:28","slug":"morton-grove-to-kennesaw-hope-for-the-new-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/morton-grove-to-kennesaw-hope-for-the-new-year\/","title":{"rendered":"MORTON GROVE TO KENNESAW: HOPE FOR THE NEW YEAR"},"content":{"rendered":"

My Christmas rounds encompassed Morton Grove, Illinois and Kennesaw, Georgia this year, which is a little like a Cold War combatant going from Moscow to Washington, DC in the same week. Advocates of gun owners\u2019 civil rights well remember that Morton Grove was the first municipality to ban private ownership of handguns, \u201cback in the day.\u201d But we also remember that after the landmark US Supreme Court decision in Heller <\/em>in 2008, Morton Grove was among the first such communities to buckle and rescind the law. Significant Other and I were on Mark Walters\u2019 radio show on 12-27-09 (downloadable from \u201cArmed American Radio\u201d at iTunes, or from Armed American Radio<\/a> and I said on the air that folks like us speaking from Morton Grove with handguns in our hotel room felt like General Sherman doing a talk show from occupied Atlanta, \u2018cause our side WON, dammit!<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A couple of days later we stopped for a hot dog at an iconic Georgia restaurant in Kennesaw, a satellite community north of Atlanta and the first municipality to pass a law requiring all law-abiding citizens to own a firearm. It was as symbolic as the Morton Grove law \u2013 no one to my knowledge has ever been brought to court for NOT owning a gun when they lived in Kennesaw \u2013 but after that law was passed, violent crime against individuals plummeted there, and has stayed down. Another victory for our side? You bet!<\/p>\n

Our Christmas rounds had taken us through six states, with my girlfriend legally carrying a concealed, lightweight Colt .45 automatic in five of them. Before we crossed into the sixth, Illinois, we pulled over and I put on an additional holster to carry her .45 as well as mine. You see, gun laws in our fifty states are a fifty-patch crazy quilt of separate laws. She didn\u2019t go flaky in Florida, didn\u2019t go ape in Atlanta, nor coo-coo in Kentucky. She didn\u2019t do anything idiotic in Indiana or terrible in Tennessee\u2026but apparently the Chicago-influenced legislators in Springfield thought she\u2019d become mentally ill in Illinois.\u00a0 And it wasn\u2019t just us visitors: Illinois, like Wisconsin, allows no provision for its own residents to carry concealed guns in public.<\/p>\n

(Fortunately, Illinois allowed out of state cops to carry even off duty long before the 2004 enactment of LEOSA, the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act, which allows us to carry nationwide on our own time. Had there been an exigent circumstance \u2013 an extreme, life-threatening emergency \u2013 she would have been legal under Illinois law to access one of my .45s while I went for the other, under the legal principle known as the Doctrine of Competing Harms in the common law.) And, frankly, on dark and stormy nights in Chicagoland, I did not feel at ALL inconvenienced carrying two lightweight Colt .45s.<\/p>\n

LEOSA has worked out well for half a decade, and the next logical step is to pass legislation that will allow law-abiding armed citizens with concealed carry permits to go discreetly armed nationwide. We came achingly close to that in the past year, missing by only a couple of votes. It needs to come up again \u2013 and be passed. But LEOSA took more than a decade to become law, so long that the current law, LEOSA, is still more commonly known by its name when it was only a hopeful bill, HR 218.<\/p>\n

From Morton Grove to Kennesaw, we\u2019re winning. We\u2019re on the side of the protective angels. But it takes a long time, and our New Year\u2019s Resolution still needs to include fighting for the rights of all Americans to protect themselves and their loved ones.<\/p>\n

From this end, to you \u2013 may you have a happy, productive, and safe 2010!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My Christmas rounds encompassed Morton Grove, Illinois and Kennesaw, Georgia this year, which is a little like a Cold War combatant going from Moscow to Washington, DC in the same week. Advocates of gun owners\u2019 civil rights well remember that Morton Grove was the first municipality to ban private ownership of handguns, \u201cback in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":6428,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-610","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-firearm-owners-civil-rights"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=610"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/610\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6428"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=610"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=610"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/MassadAyoob\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=610"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}