The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported yesterday that the Georgia House of Representatives passed a bill allowing concealed carry permit holders to carry guns into areas of airports not controlled by the federal government.

Atlanta Representative Stephanie Benfield asked a question before the legislation passed that I think will resonate with a lot of people: “How are citizens safer by allowing firearms in airports?”  Read the full AJC article here.

Even more troubling is that this is coming just a few days after a man, with a concealed carry permit, was arrested at a North Carolina airport as President Barack Obama was leaving on Air Force One for going “armed to the terror of the public”.

As thousands of concerned citizens continue to sign the Brady Campaign’s petition calling on Starbucks to change its policy allowing customers with guns into its stores (as of this writing, up to 33,000 and counting), there have been two particularly revealing responses to the controversy: one from Starbucks and the other from leading “gun rights” supporters.

Starbucks became embroiled in the gun controversy when it responded to gatherings of “gun rights” activists in its stores, carrying highly visible guns strapped to their hips, by refusing to adopt a “no guns” policy, as had California Pizza Kitchen and other similarly targeted retail chains. Starbucks recently issued a statement defending its policy by citing concern for the safety of its employees. To prohibit the open carry of guns in its stores, says Starbucks, “we would be forced to require our partners [employees] to ask law abiding customers to leave our stores, putting our partners in an unfair and potentially unsafe position.”

Of course, that raises this question: Why would it be “potentially unsafe” to ask “law abiding customers” to leave because they are violating company policy? Starbucks seems to be saying that, if its employees asked the gun-toters to leave, some of these “law abiding customers” would respond by creating a threat to employee safety. Is this not an admission by Starbucks that it currently is allowing armed and potentially dangerous people into its stores? Plus, it is surely self-contradictory to label the gun-toters “law abiding customers” while, in the same sentence, suggesting that, if asked to leave, some of these same customers would resist the request, thereby violating trespass laws? These “law abiding customers” don’t sound very law abiding to me.

Ironically, Starbucks’ management seems to share the safety concerns of its many customers who feel threatened by the well-armed people who now have a home in the company’s coffee houses. But the company has concluded that it must tolerate armed and potentially dangerous people in its stores because it would be more dangerous to ask them to leave. Does Starbucks really believe there is no way it can maintain a “no guns” policy without endangering its baristas?

I suggest that it take a page from its competitor, Peet’s Coffee & Tea. When Peet’s also was confronted with the prospect of meetings of the “open carry” crowd in its stores, it immediately announced a “no guns” policy, said it would post signs to that effect in its stores, and added that “in the event a customer enters the store displaying a firearm and is not a uniformed law enforcement officer, we have instructed our store management teams to immediately call their local police department for assistance.” Peet’s figured out a way to protect the comfort and safety of its customers without endangering its employees; that is, by relying on law enforcement. Why can’t Starbucks do the same?

The other revealing reaction – from leaders of the “gun rights” movement – is to suggest that the “open carry” people may be hurting the gun rights cause. For example, Bob Barr, my erstwhile debate opponent when he was in Congress, recently suggested that “firearms advocates might be better advised not to press the issue publicly by pointedly visiting Starbucks establishments with firearms openly displayed. Sometimes quiet advocacy speaks louder than waving a red flag in someone’s face.” Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation (generally considered more extreme than the NRA) told the New York Times, “I’m all for open-carry laws. But I don’t think flaunting it is very productive for our cause. It just scares people.”

Both Barr and Gottlieb are strong proponents of the “more guns, less crime” ideology – the idea that the more guns there are in homes, and in public places, the safer those places will be because criminals will be deterred from attacking when armed, law abiding citizens are present to resist. It is, therefore, surprising for them to take a dim view of the open carrying of guns. According to their “more guns, less crime” logic, locations where open carry occurs should be the safest of all, because criminals will have no doubt that their attacks likely will be met by armed resistance. At the very least, the Barr/Gottlieb comments concede that other Starbucks customers do not share their confidence in the public safety benefits of open carry. Instead, as Gottlieb says, open carry “just scares people.”

Implicitly, Barr and Gottlieb are advising gun owners who want to carry guns in public to keep them concealed from view; that is, make sure the danger is hidden. Perhaps this exposes their real concern about the open carry movement – that it eventually will cause a surge in public concern about the far more prevalent concealed carrying of guns made possible by the gun lobby-supported “shall-issue” laws passed in most states during the last two decades making it far easier to obtain licenses to carry concealed weapons. They also likely fear that open carry may intensify public opposition to recent efforts to gradually expand the locations in which concealed carry may occur –such as parks, bars, college campuses, even airports. After all, it’s not the “openness” of open carry that scares people – it’s the presence of the guns themselves and the inherent danger they entail. The only reason there is not an equivalent reaction to concealed carry is that the danger is, by definition, hidden from view.

The evidence is overwhelming that the “shall-issue” concealed carry laws have been a disaster for public safety. They have allowed dangerous people to obtain concealed carry licenses, those people have committed grievous crimes, and the scholarly research shows that the laws generally have been “associated with uniform increases in crime.” But the danger becomes evident to the public only episodically – when someone with a concealed carry license shoots someone accidentally or commits a violent act, such as the six multiple shootings committed by concealed carry licensees in 2009 alone. What if concealed carry licensees had to reveal they were packing whenever they entered Starbucks or other public places? The debate over guns in public would be far different.

“Gun rights” advocates like Barr and Gottlieb have good reason to fear that their “guns anywhere” agenda would be threatened if the open carry movement starts causing the public to understand the true danger of guns in public – the open danger, and the concealed danger as well.

What are state legislators across the country doing with concealed carry laws? They are making it easier for people to carry guns any and everywhere, including into restaurants and bars where alcohol is served. Two recent incidents of concealed carry permit holders killing inocent people highlight why pushing guns in every direction in our society is a dangerous and deadly idea.

Last week, in Houston a man fatally shot a middle schooler in the head during a road rage incident:

A man accused of killing a 13-year-old girl during a road rage incident is out of jail and has been given conditions for his release, KPRC Local 2 reported Friday.

Houston police said Richard Calderon, 24, hit the teen’s mother’s car at about 8:20 p.m. Wednesday and then left the scene.

The mother, a police officer at Texas Southern University, tried to catch up to the vehicle to get its license plate number. As she drove by the vehicle in the 14000 block of Fleetwell Drive, Calderon fired shots at her car, police said.

Alexis Wiley, 13, was shot in the head. She was taken to Memorial Hermann Hospital, where she died a few hours later.

Read more here.

And two weeks ago in Ohio, the Columbus Dispatch reported that a man whose “blood-alcohol level was above 0.08 percent” shot a 22-year-old woman in the abdomen, killing her:

Culbertson [the shooter] “went outside, loaded the weapon with a few rounds and fired them, then went back in the house,” the sheriff said.

When Vernon asked whether the gun was empty, Culbertson replied: “‘Let’s see.’ Then he pointed it at her, fired and hit her,” Kelly said.

Witnesses said Culbertson and Vernon did not argue before the shooting.

“I agree with that,” Kelly said. “I believe it was just carelessness with a firearm and alcohol. They do not mix.”

Read more here.

Despite stories like these, state legislators in Tennessee, Arizona, and now Virginia are expanding the places people can legally carry weapons. As we allow firearms to permeate our entire culture more and more, we can unfortunately expect to see more and more of these stories.

Learn more about concealed carry or look at other crimes by concealed carry permit holders.

Anymore, incidents of so-called “law-abiding citizens” with state-issued permits to carry concealed weapons shooting and killing their fellow citizens are becoming so commonplace as to merit special mention only in particularly noteworthy examples.

The Fort Hood terrorist shooter is a recent example.

The Appomattox mass killer is an even more recent one.

Then yesterday, the Salt Lake Tribune reported a 70-year-old woman has been arrested for shooting and killing a 34-year-old Head Start teacher, the single mother of two children, outside the teacher’s school:

On Friday, 70-year-old Mary Nance Hanson went looking for Tetyana Nikitina carrying a loaded gun, police said.

About 3 p.m., she found the 34-year-old teacher outside the Head Start school where she worked.

Hanson fired five shots from her .38-caliber revolver as Nikitina sat behind the wheel of her Dodge Mangum, killing her.

As the single mother of two bled, Hanson called 911 from the corner of the parking lot and told dispatchers she had just shot the woman. When asked why, Hanson replied she did not know and that was all she was going to say.

And on Friday night, she still wasn’t talking, said Unified Police Lt. Don Hutson.

“That is still a mystery to us. What may have tipped her over the edge, why the timing, that is not clear,” Hutson said. “I’m not sure we’re going to know that until the time comes for trial, because she’s not explaining.”

…

Police say Hanson shot at least five bullets. Nikitina was struck in the head, and her car rolled into a parked minivan. Hutson said police found five shell casings in the parking lot and five bullets in the pistol’s cylinder, noting that Hanson had reloaded the gun.

Hutson said some teachers in the school saw the shooting. Angela Crosby, a parent who was taking a child-development class at the Head Start building, heard the shots.

“When I looked out the window, the lady was in the corner” of the parking lot, Crosby said.

Crosby said Hanson was pointing to herself. Police forcibly took her to the ground, Crosby said, and took her gun. Hanson had a gash on her forehead when she was placed in a police car about an hour later.

Hanson had a concealed firearm permit issued or renewed three months ago, Hutson said….

[more]

Just to be clear: the State of Utah just gave an accused killer — a so-called “law-abiding citizen” — permission to carry a revolver used in the shooting death of a Head Start teacher and single mother.

Apparently Utah thought that was good policy.

(Do you hear that?  Yes, that’s the NRA’s deafening silence.)

A U.S. soldier, under investigation by the FBI for his communications with a radical Yemeni cleric tied to al-Qaida, uses a gun to kill thirteen and wound thirty-eight at Fort Hood, one of our nation’s leading military bases. A Nigerian terrorist with ties to the same radical cleric comes close to detonating a bomb on a U.S. airliner about to land in Detroit, stopped only by the bravery of a passenger. As to the airline bomber, President Obama acknowledged that “the system has failed in a potentially disastrous way.” The President undeniably is on the defensive, as his opponents do their best to paint him as “soft on terror”.

I have a modest suggestion for the President. In the State of the Union address, demonstrate that national security trumps fear of the gun lobby.

Make no mistake about it, the gun lobby’s influence has made the war against terrorists harder to fight.

First, during the Bush Administration, Congress responded to the gun lobby’s paranoia about “gun registration” by enacting a requirement – as part of the infamous Tiahrt Amendments named for their sponsor Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) – mandating that records of Brady Law background checks on approved purchasers be destroyed within 24 hours of the purchase. During the Clinton years, these records were preserved for 90 days, which allowed auditing of the background check system to determine if some illegal gun buyers had slipped through the cracks. The National Rifle Association failed in its lawsuit challenging the temporary retention of the records as an illegal “gun registry”; indeed, such a registry was precluded by the Brady Act itself, which mandated the destruction of the records, but did not say when that had to occur.

In the case of Maj. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, the Tiahrt requirement meant that investigators had no way of knowing a rather material piece of information – that Hasan had purchased a gun. Because Hasan had no disqualifying record that would have blocked his purchase, the FBI’s record of his purchase disappeared after 24 hours. (The only other federal record of his purchase – the form he would have filled out at the gun shop – by law must remain at the gun shop, yet another irrational restriction on gun records that has its origins in gun lobby paranoia about “registration.”) According to former FBI agent Brady Garrett, “The piece of information about the gun could have been critical.” Earlier this year, the Obama Administration supported some changes to the Tiahrt Amendments, but proposed no change in the record destruction provision.

Second, due to gun lobby opposition, Congress has done nothing to close the so-called “terror gap” in federal gun laws. Our gun laws are so weak that individuals who have close ties to terrorist groups can be denied guns only if they have already committed a felony, or fall into another of the limited categories of prohibited buyers. The result is a shocking anomaly: a person on the terrorist watch list can be barred from getting on airplanes, but not barred from buying as many guns as he wants. According to the Government Accountability Office, in the five years ending in February of last year, 865 individuals on the terrorist watch list were able to buy guns at licensed gun dealers. As we contemplate why Nidal Hasan and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the airline bomber, were not on the terrorist watch list, let us not overlook the absurdity that, under current law, their inclusion on the list would not have disqualified them from buying 20 assault rifles from a gun shop.

Repealing the Tiahrt record destruction requirement and closing the “terror gap” are not only good policy; for the Obama Administration, they are also good politics. The President should challenge those in Congress who are trying to hang the “soft on terror” label on him to demonstrate their own toughness by standing up to the gun lobby in the interest of national security. He should make them choose between pandering to the paranoia of the gun extremists and preventing terrorists from arming themselves. Keep in mind that a recent survey by Frank Luntz – that most Republican of pollsters – found that 82% of NRA members support “prohibiting persons on the terrorist watch lists from purchasing guns.” On this issue, the NRA’s extremist leadership is hopelessly out of touch with its membership.

We saw multiple U.S. Senators with “A” ratings from the NRA defy the gun lobby to vote to confirm Justice Sotomayor. Which NRA supporters in Congress are willing to vote to allow suspected terrorists to buy guns?

On the politics, don’t take my word for it. Listen to Rahm Emanuel who, slightly more than two years ago, addressed a Brady Center gathering with these words:

“The most important thing we can do, and we’ve got to make this a number one issue . . . if you are on the no-fly list . . . you cannot buy a handgun in America . . . As my old boss used to say, give me that vote, and throw me into that briar patch, and I’ll make politics out of that every day, because if it’s between that terrorist list and the NRA, I know where America is going to be every time and they’re going to make the right choice . . . .”

Rahm, you were right then. And you can do something about it now. Sometimes, on certain issues, the policy and the politics are perfectly aligned. On the issue of guns and terror, that time is now.

For more information, see Dennis Henigan’s new book, Lethal Logic: Exploding the Myths that Paralyze American Gun Policy.