Posted on 10/28/2003 2:57:10 PM PST by Monitor
The bill that would allow the carrying of hidden weapons in Wisconsin features another level of concealment many missed at first glance: The names of those applying for a concealed-carry permit would themselves be kept secret.
The bill ought to be defeated, in our view, because it might heighten gun violence in the streets. But regardless of that issue, the Assembly should delete from the legislation the exemption from the state's open records law. The Senate approved the bill with the exemption the other day.
Gov. Jim Doyle put it well: "Under this bill, hunting licenses would still be considered open records in Wisconsin, yet permits allowing people to carry concealed weapons into Little League games would be kept secret."
The reasons the bill's advocates give for the secrecy don't track with reality. Minnesota law professor Joseph Olson asked rhetorically: "Do you really want to give burglars a list of whose homes to burglarize?"
The idea is that they would avoid homes with concealed-carry permits. Your typical burglar, however, doesn't check public records. And even if he did, he couldn't be sure that a person not listed on a concealed-carry registry lacks a weapon on hand at home - for which you don't need a permit.
A registry would help armed robbers even less. After all, they typically pick their victims without any idea of their names.
The stated justification for the secrecy is so lame that it raises the issue of whether ulterior motives are involved. The availability of names has enabled journalists and others to identify some sensational killers elsewhere as holders of concealed-carry licenses. Also, the Violence Policy Center, which supports more firearm regulation, has used public records to point out that the authorities in Texas arrest an average of two concealed-carry licensees a month for especially violent crimes, such as homicide, kidnapping and rape.
Keeping names secret would make it tough, if not impossible, to come up with such findings in Wisconsin. Is that the real motive? In any event, journalists and scholars and advocates on either side of the gun-control issue ought to be able to examine how well a concealed-carry law is working by having access to a registry of permit holders. That's the way a democracy is supposed to work.
From the Oct. 28, 2003 editions of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
What they don't bother to tell you is that those two arrests still represent a much lower rate of crime than in the general population of Texas.
EXCELLENT start. Now, follow up with his female counterpart....
-archy-/-
In this case all you have to do is look for the 2 marks, < table > and < /table >, that contain all the info you want. ie. title to the last footnote. Then highlight it, copy, then paste it into notepad, or some other text editor. It can be pasted directly into FR's posting box and edited from there. You can ignore all the font and other stuff , unless it causes a problem with the FR display. If it's in notepad, the file can be saved as a .htm and opened as a local file with your browser.
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