LITTLE ROCK — This is Arkansas, all right?
Let’s just assume everyone is carrying a firearm and stop the pointless, vicious arguing.
Let’s not bother ourselves further trying to make sense of the bizarre, roiling debate. You cannot possibly glean logic and reason from all this vexing and irrational anger.
Why would a man insist that a government record of his license to carry a concealed weapon be kept secret from the public while, at the same time, he wants a law allowing him to carry that weapon openly, meaning in a position by which it presumably would not be secret?
“It’s none of your business whether I have a gun,” said the holstered man with the twitching hand.
Why would a journalist otherwise trusted as responsible and sensible-she edits Arkansas Business, which seemingly would be more concerned with real estate records than gun ones-make a targeted spectacle of herself by getting in under the wire on the new Freedom of Information Act exemption law to link (for a short time) the list of concealed-weapon licensees on her publication’s website?
What does one really gain by plastering or scouring this list of scores of thousands of names and ZIP codes of Arkansawyers? What practical and valuable information has been ascertained by discovering that Joe Blow of ZIP code 72216 is on the list of persons permitted to carry concealed weapons?
He’s Joe Blow of Arkansas. He’s got a gun.
That isn’t news.
Why, then, would Joe Blow of Arkansas go ballistic and get on the Internet to reveal personal, harassing and conceivably threatening information about the editor previously referenced?
On what conceivable basis does he explain that he is frightened by this disclosure?
He’s the one with the gun. The one who ought to be afraid is the one without.
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Why do gun fanatics argue that the ultimate authority in all this rests with the absolute federal right to bear arms of the Second Amendment?
They take that to mean, by my logical extrapolation, that no one could keep them from building a hydrogen bomb that they would be entitled to keep secret even as they would be equally entitled to carry it openly on their belt.
They obviously don’t believe in other absolute guarantees of constitutional freedoms. They don’t believe in an absolute free press, certainly not by the business journalist previously referenced.
Why, if the freedom to have a gun is absolute, do Arkansas sportsmen endure the logically deduced unconstitutionality of a bow season for hunting? How can the state of Arkansas presume to restrict gun use to mere seasons when the Second Amendment says absolutely, and transcendently, otherwise?
And here’s my favorite question:
Why would Lt. Gov Mark Darr issue a public statement saying he signed that FOI-exempting bill while Gov. Mike Beebe was out of town because he wanted to protect from public identification people such as two women . . . wait for it . . . he then proceeded to name?
Now, in regard to the aforementioned and beleaguered business editor, Gwen Moritz of Arkansas Business in Little Rock:
I bothered her Thursday with emailed questions. Why publish the concealed-carry list in the first place and then why take it down while beating herself up in a mea culpa?
In this case, I am able to move from asking rhetorical questions to providing one person’s actual answers. Moritz wrote:
“I think this is the answer: I don’t write for a general audience. And I wasn’t prepared-didn’t even consider, really-how quickly the point I was trying to make-that our Legislature had not expanded anyone’s gun rights but had actively taken away our right to know whom our government has licensed and not licensed-was completely lost in the static of talk radio and the Internet.
“But [that] wouldn’t have been enough to make me back down.
“The reason I removed the link promptly was that I began to understand that some of these licensees were truly terrified, some with good reason because they have escaped abusive situations and have made efforts to fly below the radar.
“And to them my action was not principled, but actively malicious, which was never my intent at all.”
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John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial, Pages 15 on 03/05/2013