While New York and Massachusetts and the like are falling all over themselves to strip their subjects of more and more rights, in Utah we’re seeing this:
Proposal: No permit needed to carry concealed weapon in Utah
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Utah bill would do away with need for concealed-gun permit
In short, this would make Utah a “Constitutional Carry” state, like Vermont. While this is undeniably the more Constitutionally proper approach, it does have some practical concerns. Primary, at least to me, is that a Utahn might grow up under Constitutional Carry, and then make the mistake of leaving the state. Even though many states recognize the Utah concealed carry permit, if you don’t *have* a permit, suddenly you’d be in legal trouble.
Also: CCW permit holders have a statistically significant lower crime rate than non-permit holders. Even the virulently hoplophobic “Violence Policy Center” supports this fact. (There approximately 8,590,000 CCW holders in the US; the VPC claims 499 “Total people killed by concealed carry killers,” from May 2007 to the present. This works out to very roughly 84 people killed by CCW’ers per year, out of a population of 8.5 million… a killing rate of 0.98 per 100,000 per year. The US as a whole has a murder rate of 4.8 per 100,000; event the vaunted Brits come in at 1.2). But if Utah goes to a Constitutional carry, then those stats go out the window; every gangbanger with a gat will now be counted as a “legal concealed carry” type by the political hoplophobes.
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Fun fact: Chicago has a population of 2.7 million, of whom essentially none are legal CCW holders. In 2012, Chicagoans killed more people than the three-times larger population of CCW’ers killed in nearly six years. This means that your average CCW’er is 18 times less likely to shoot you for no good reason than the average Chicagoan.
