Wisconsin instituted its Shall Issue concealed carry permit program on November 1. By 9:00 AM, over 83,000 applications were downloaded from the Wisconsin Justice Department website. The website normally gets about 80,000 hits a day, but by noon it had gotten ten times than much.
In the days and weeks leading up to Tuesday, the anti-gun crowd made its usual pleas that there would be blood in the streets, and Wisconsin would be like the wild west. I really felt for Wisconsin gun owners, who fielded objections and got their law changed.
Every day since then, I've spent a few minutes doing an interwebz search for stories of murder and mayhem. I can't find any. I've even suggested on Twitter (direct to the CSGV and Brady Campaign) that government censorship was to blame. Nothing.
Maybe Sunday will be the test, when thousands shoot up the church services.
Seriously, the point of this post is this: the anti-gun crowd say the same thing in every state, every time there is a new gun law.
> Allowing concealed carry will lead to blood in the streets.
> Allowing concealed carry in bars or restaurants that sell alcohol will lead to drunken shoot outs.
> Allowing open carry will lead to fear and mayhem.
> Allowing constitutional carry will lead to the fall of civilization as we know it.
Each time the alarm is sounded, and nothing happens. Then, then next time, the same alarm is sounded, and again nothing happens. Nothing, except the murder and violent crime rates decrease in states with permissive gun laws, and stay high in Illinois and other states with restrictive laws.
When will someone step up in a state with a new gun law and bring this up ahead of time? Take the wind out of the anti-gun sails - bring up their arguments first and show that they are baseless.
Let those of us who've been there and done that step up and help out those in the states who are trying to improve. I know I will.
