I went. It wasn't as one-sided as I thought it would be. The moderator seemed to be a bit anti-gun--at least from the way she phrased things. She went through some statistics and said things like "guns killed" this number of people, etc. As we all know, guns don't kill people, people kill people.
Anyways, I think Andy Allen did a good job of portraying the pro-gun side of things. Senator Christensen did a good job, too.
The first point of discussion was the second amendment and the constitutional law professor, Prof. Berger, talked about the two clauses and how they could be interpreted differently, etc. A couple of supreme court rulings were discussed, notably Heller and MacDonald, stating that they defined that the second amendment was an individual right and applied to federal and states. Interestingly, Miller was discussed briefly--Andy talked about this during his first chance to talk and he got to a point where he was saying that in the Miller decision that the supreme court thought that a gun must be useful in the military to be kept as a personal arm. At this point the moderator cut him off. It looked like he was going to juxtapose the Miller decision with current legislation looking to ban military style weapons. Of course, I don't know for sure since he was cut off. Oh well.
A lot of the discussion was on mental health issues and the short-comings that are related to mental health care, diagnosis, etc. If I remember correctly, the Omaha Police Chief made a comment that Omaha has had a number of shootings: some mass shootings that ended approximately 10 lives, but that number is far out-numbered by the number of people that die on the streets in any given number of years. He's right, but I wonder how many of the people dying on the streets are criminals being killed by other criminals.
The misnomer "assault weapon" was talked about for a while, Andy pointed out that Feinstein doesn't even know what these guns are, they're just "scary" ones--example: using a M16 to point out the type of weapons she wants to ban, but they're already banned (one person clapped for this response, everyone turned and looked at him). Andy's right about Feinsteins ignorance and started talking about what a barrel shroud is and how she couldn't define it, etc., but it seemed to me that there weren't many people in the audience that really cared. It seems like they just choose to be ignorant and don't care to hold crazy people like Feinstein accountable. So frustrating.
Another large portion of the discussion was on how gun violence (and violence in general) is a multi-faceted problem that has to do with children's relationships with their parents, their teachers, their friends, what they're exposed to when they grow up, etc. In short, it's a community effort to deal with the problem of violence in general.
After some general questions that had been prepared in advance, the panel took questions from the audience--notecards were handed out while entering the auditorium, the questions were written on them and handed in.
There were a couple of questions that were interesting. One was asking about universal background checks. The senator asked for some clarification as we already have background checks, the moderator clarified by guessing that the person was referring to the "loop hole" at gun shows. He basically said that we already have background checks and he didn't really know what "they" want us to do. This was met with some sneering and sounds of exasperation from the crowd--the lady next to me was huffing, puffing and talking to herself during this. It was clear that she was worked up over the so-called "gun show loophole". It's too bad that no one noted that it's already a federal crime to knowingly sell a firearm to a prohibited person--hence why many people ask to see a driver's license along with a permit to purchase or permit to carry when selling guns.
Near the end, it was asked if anyone had a question that was eating away at them, would keep them up at night, etc. A number of hands went up and a young man was chosen to ask his question. It was a bit long-winded, but the jist of it was that he was a US Marine and didn't like that it was illegal for him to carry a gun on campus for protection and wanted to know why concealed handgun permittees could not carry on campus. One of the panelists, Prof. Scalora a psychologist, gave a hand-waving response, saying something along the lines of that not everyone has the same training to handle bad situations under stress as a marine. As a graduate student and CHP holder, it'd be nice if my permit were valid on campus... The audience was asked to raise their hands if they'd be interested in a legal way to carry a concealed weapon on campus--a surprising number of hands went up--mine included, of course. Then the audience was asked to raise their hands if they would NOT want there to be a legal way to carry a concealed weapon on campus--it was hard judge, but I'm pretty sure there were more hands up for this. Oh well, not surprising.
After the questions were done, the moderator asked the panelists to give a 30 second wrap-up. At this point an older gentleman in the audience stood up and started talking about how Colt was selling AR's in the early 90's and called them sporter rifles, he was quite long winded and eventually the panel just started talking over him and said their 30 second wrap-up, thanking everyone, etc.
Overall, I thought it was an interesting discussion. It wasn't as one-sided as I thought it would be. Banning so called "assault rifles" and such came up, of course, and the constitutional law professor said something like, "we don't know if it'll help to ban them, but it might, so it's worth doing". The senator had some thoughts about this, stating that people are afraid of a slippery slope, take this gun today, take that one tomorrow, and so on. The constitutional law professor countered that by saying that the slippery slope argument was ridiculous and that banning these kinds of things is "common sense" and that they shouldn't take hunting rifles or guns used for self protection. I wish I could have told him that the magazine capacity limits ruin so many guns used for self protection. How many people carry a pistol with more than 10 rounds? Probably quite a few...
I had hoped someone would ask why ban so called "assault rifles" when they're used in a very small percentage of crimes, but it didn't come up.
I know it's worth trying, but I don't think it's going to change the minds of people that are firmly on the anti-gun side of things. They don't own them, they don't want to own them, and they don't want ANYONE to own them. So frustrating. Guess we'll just have to keep trying.
