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Corzine to Millions of Honest Gun Owners: You're Potential Criminals and a Threat to Public Safety
Posted by Scott L. Bach, Esq. July 21, 2009 5:56PM
Memo to the millions of American citizens who have managed to qualify for government permits to carry firearms: you are "potential criminals," and you are "a threat to our citizens' safety and well-being," even though you have passed criminal background checks and satisfied state firearms proficiency standards. That according to New Jersey governor Jon Corzine (D), who apparently thinks that the path to re-election later this year is paved by trampling the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms.
Governor Corzine and other far-left New Jersey politicians are beside themselves over an imminent floor vote in the U.S. Senate on the Thune-Vitter Amendment to S. 1390 which would require states like New Jersey, which refuse to recognize the Constitutional right to keep and bear arms, to honor Right-to-Carry permits issued by other states, much in the way driver's licenses are honored throughout the country.
Calling the legislation "an egregious threat to communities across the country," a press release issued by Governor Corzine makes the revealing statement that more guns, "especially in the hands of potential criminals, do not make us safer." The statement exposes the Governor's fundamentally misguided view that anyone who chooses to exercise the Constitutional right to bear arms for personal protection, even with government sanction, is a potential criminal from whom the public needs to be protected.
"We will never compromise, not even one inch, where public safety is concerned," concludes the Governor's press release, revealing Corzine's lack of even a basic understanding of the right of self defense and the part that Right-to-Carry plays within it.
In an era where vicious criminal predators prey upon the weak and vulnerable, the U.S. Supreme Court has surprisingly held that police owe no duty to protect individual citizens and cannot be held accountable when they fail to do so. This means that from the time you dial 911 until the police arrive, you're on your own. Right-to-Carry helps level the playing field in the gravest extreme, and offers victims a fighting chance while they wait for help to arrive.
Approximately 40 states comprehend this simple truth and recognize the Right-to-Carry. Wherever Right-to-Carry laws have passed, there has been a corresponding and sustained drop in violent crime rates, for one simple reason: criminals go somewhere else when they think their victims may be armed. When the predators can't tell the difference between the lions and the sheep, the whole flock is safer. Right-to-Carry thus benefits not only the law-abiding citizens who exercise their Constitutional rights, but also those around them who don't.
Think about it: every mass killing in recent memory has had one thing in common: the victims were unarmed and unable to defend themselves against violent and brutal surprise attacks by predators. Right-to-Carry helps even out the odds, and criminals know it. A study for the Department of Justice found that 40 percent of felons had not committed crimes because they feared the prospective victims were armed.
The Thune-Vitter Amendment expands Right-to-Carry and will enhance public safety, contrary to Governor Corzine's ill-advised view. It recognizes that competent, responsible, law-abiding Americans still deserve our trust and confidence when they cross state lines.
New Jersey's policies on gun rights are as backwards as its policies on taxes. It's time for elected officials who swore to uphold the Constitution to stop trampling on our protected gun rights.
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