Conservatives, Carry Permits, and Secular Liberal Evangelism

Hi there. My name’s Joel, and I’ll be your occasional Second Amendment issues blogger here. This particular essay is posted both at True North and at Windypundit, the latter of which is set up to handle comments.

Why a Minnesota radical moderate is posting a blog entry about conservatives and liberals on a Chicago area blog is one of those little mysteries of life, kinda like why flammable and inflammable mean the same thing.

But I digress.

I’m always a bit cautious about mentioning who has taken their carry class with me.  It’s not a legal thing — actual permit data is protected by the Data Practices Act, and isn’t for public consumption, anymore than your 1040 is, but that’s a different matter — but more of a propriety thing:  getting a carry permit is a personal decision, and whether or not that’s to be kept private is, well, not my call*.

I did a private class, not too long ago, for, well, somebody who has a: some statewide prominence in Minnesota, and b: a stalker.  He or she asked me not to mention his or her name publicly, so that made it easy.  (I think it was probably the right call in that case, but, heck, I’m utterly sure that it’s not my call, so . . . )

So I’ve been thinking a bit about how to discuss this last weekend’s class.  Which was, well, a blast. 

A bunch of the MOB folks asked if I was willing to put on a private class for them a while back, and we made it happen this last weekend, and it was even more fun than usual, for a lot of reasons. 

Over at Eckernet, Kevin, who sat in on the class — and helped out; it was great to have him around — had some comments on it.  Other than the nice things he said about me — like I’m going to disagree? — I think he had a good spin on one part of the class, but I was thinking about another matter.

Normally, when I do a carry class, I go to some trouble to try to keep my own politics out of it, most of the time.  Seems only fair; after all, people aren’t signing up to spend a day being lectured to me on who they should vote for or what political positions to take. And, besides, politically speaking, I’m a radical moderate; nobody agrees with me.  

There’s a couple things I feel very strongly about where I take off those restraints, though; I’m strongly of the opinion that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution recognizes a fundamental human right — self-defense — and that all rights come with responsibilities.

But this time, I took all of the self-restraints off.  It wasn’t just that, by and large, I find myself agreeing with conservatives — and, like most of the MOB crowd, these folks are definitely conservatives — on many matters, but more it’s that, by and large, conservatives tend to be more tolerant of differing opinions than liberals are.  (Yes, there are intolerant conservatives and tolerant liberals — and I know some of both — but I’m talking about definite trends.) 

And there have been some definite political implications around the gun stuff, of late.  Like, say, this award that I’m not entirely sure Obama is thrilled with having received.

All of which, by kind of a long road, leads me to a point I do keep making:  self-defense — and that includes carry permits — aren’t a conservative issue, or a liberal issue, but a human rights issue. 

That doesn’t mean that this stuff doesn’t have political implications; it does. If you can persuade your liberal (and moderate) as well as your conservative friends to consider getting a carry permit and carrying a handgun as part of their personal safety strategy, you won’t might be doing something with political implications.

Right now, we’ve got just over 60,000 Minnesotans with carry permits.  While the heavy lifting in getting the law passed that made that possible was done almost entirely by conservative Republicans, it would not passed without votes from a (small, granted) number of liberal DFLers. 

And it’s not just conservatives who have gotten carry permits, either.  My admittedly liberal, tree-hugging wife was the first woman in line in Hennepin County to apply for her carry permit back in 2003, just to pick one example.

So, here’s the pitch:  if you’re a conservative, try to get your liberal friends — and I don’t know a conservative who doesn’t have liberal friends — to get their permits.  Sure, I’d love to have them in one of my classes, but that’s not the point — there’s more than a hundred certified organizations, and hundreds upon hundreds of instructors, all across Minnesota, who can put them through a class.

How many people with carry permits do you know who would be real eager to vote for a politician who wants to take their rights away?

Yeah.  I didn’t think so, either.

Yup.  From one perspective, a right-wing gun nut can be just a liberal who got a carry permit, just like a conservative is a liberal who got mugged, and a Sixth Amendment radical is just a conservative who got thumped by a cop.

But I digress.

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* Except, of course, for me.  Then again, ever since I testified in front of the MN House and Senate Committees, some years ago, on the necessity of reforming our (now-formerly) antiquated, bureaucrats-know-best carry laws, I’ve been more than a little out of the gun closet.