Letter to Representatives Opposing Permit to Purchase Law

I am opposed to House Bill 1143, and its companion bill in the Senate, because (1) they are constitutionally violative in their present form and (2) that there are better and more constitutionally friendly ways to achieve the bill's stated objectives.

(1)

The Bill of Rights set out a sequence of carefully structured rights that together reflect a certain and fundamental conception of society. They are not ad hoc benefits but rather establish the essential political nature of our country; not simply the balance between governors and governed but the relationship between the people themselves.

The right to speak is not simply the right to sound off in a closet but to converse, dispute and agree with others. The right to a jury trial is likewise the right to have, not some authority, but untrained fellow citizens make the decision as to whether to forfeit a person's freedom. Both these rights entail well known risks of which the Framers were well aware. But they explicitly rejected the notion that an attendant risk should qualify or negate the right. It is constitutionally inconceivable that a permit or training should be required for jury duty or to exercise free speech, even if it is granted that well-trained, well-informed people would make better jurors and betters talkers in general.

The same considerations apply to the Second Amendment. Both England and Colonial America were freely armed societies. The army, the militias and the constabularies were drawn *from* people who were self armed. For both political and personal purposes the Framer's insured the right to keep and bear arms. To be hostile to that provision is to be hostile to the conception behind the Bill or Rights as a whole.

(2)

It is undeniable that, in all things, a trained person is better than an untrained one. I have no objection to promoting training in firearms. My objection is to making it mandatory and (worse yet) to using it as a means to discourage the exercise of fundamental right.

If the Legislature is genuinely interested in promoting firearm safety training, the way to do that is to incorporate firearm training in high school curricula. When this country was rural there was not a boy or girl who did not learn how to shoot. There is no reason why that instruction should not be undertaken now by schools. Likewise county sheriff's offices could offer training programs to adults, for a very minimal fee and/or encouraged by a tax credit. Programs such as these would achieve the *avowed* objective of the proposed legislation without being punitive in character or constitutionally obnoxious.

Sincerely...