EDITORIAL: The gun issue lives on for the care and feeding of politicians

Like undisciplined children munching their way through their bags of trick-or-treat candy, gun-zealot politicians can never get enough of the sweet rewards they crave in pandering to gun owners and would-be owners.

This political greediness is on vivid display in Wisconsin, where Republican legislators are introducing proposals ranging from ludicrous to dangerous that are aimed at currying glory as gun rights champions.

Ludicrous is a bill that would exempt gun purchases from sales taxes on certain days. Dangerous is legislation that would eliminate the basic firearms training courses required for concealed carry permits. In between is a gratuitous, utterly unnecessary, waste-of-time-and-money proposal for a new provision of the state constitution written in gun gobbledigook. These attempts to exploit the aura of the Second Amendment, a right that is held dear by most Americans, are going on as though gun rights are somehow endangered. It’s obvious that is a fake issue. If any right can be said to be set in stone, it is the right of Americans to own guns. 

The U.S. Supreme Court confirmed that once and for all in unequivocal language in its 2008 decision that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, including self-defense. In 2022, the Supreme Court followed up with a ruling that all states in the U.S. are required to allow people to carry concealed handguns.

The right to own a gun is so secure that it has made America the country with the highest number of guns per capita in the world, with 120 firearms per 100 residents—more guns than people.

That’s not good enough for state Sen. Andre Jacque (R-New Franken) and state Rep. Chanz (R-Grand View), who are sponsoring legislation meant to act as an incentive for Wisconsinites to buy more guns by making firearms and ammunition exempt from sales taxes during the third week of December and on the Fourth of July each year. 

If the state can really afford to subsidize consumer purchases by declaring sales tax holidays for certain products, only gun-lobby toadies would chose firearms instead of, say, new and used automobiles, washing machines or baby beds.

Those same legislators no doubt see the elimination of the safety training requirement they are proposing as another means of goosing gun sales. Imagine a gun retailer’s pitch: Save $50 in sales tax by buying your significant other a top-of-the-line Glock 9mm semi-automatic pistol with 100 rounds of ammunition as a Christmas gift that will be ready to use right out of box with no annoying training needed. That training, of course, is needed precisely because concealed carry laws have encouraged the arming of large numbers of people with little or no experience in gun handling with weapons that can be carried almost everywhere and are as deadly as those carried by highly trained police officers and members of the military. 

In Wisconsin, if you are at least 21 years old and not a felon and complete one of the widely available gun safety courses (one is advertised as an “easy, relaxed four-hour course”) you qualify for a concealed carry permit. It should not be any easier than that.

A number of states allow permitless concealed carry. Wisconsin is smarter—polls show overwhelming disapproval of eliminating the permit and training requirement. The Marquette University Law School poll found that 79% of state residents oppose permitless carry. The GOP gun-glorification push includes new wording for Article 1 of the state Constitution that begs for rejection not only because it is unnecessary, but also because its stumbling syntax would defile the otherwise orderly language of the Constitution.

The new section of the first article of the document would (painfully) read: “The people have the inalienable right to keep and bear arms, which right shall never be infringed. The right of the people to keep and bear arms is a fundamental individual right, and any restriction on that right shall be subject to strict scrutiny.”

That word pizza would replace the simple declarative sentence now in the Constitution: “The people have the right to keep and bear arms for security, defense, hunting, recreation or any other lawful purpose.”

Even that is a superfluous feel-good assurance. The U.S. Constitution says it all: Americans have the right to own guns. 

But that is not enough for politicians bent on demagoging the gun issue. It apparently never will be.