24 March 2018 — 1245 mdt

Gunpowder Saturday

Against a backdrop of the Parkland, FL, school massacre and the fatal shooting at Great Mills High School in Maryland, firearms politics dominates the first weekend of Spring across the nation.

• Hundreds of thousands, many if not most of high school age, are gathering in Washington, D.C., to march for tougher gun control. Similar “sibling” March for Our Lives rallies are being held in cities across the nation; Missoula, Helena, Bozeman, and Billing, are the locations in Montana. President Trump flew to Florida, where he may get in a round of golf.


• March for Our Guns is rallying in Helena, where a featured speaker will be Rep. Seth Berglee (R-Joliet), whose bill to arm school staff, HB-385, was shot down 57–43 in the 2017 legislative session. Berglee is running for a third term in a heavily Republican district. Expect HB-383 or something similar to be introduced in the 2019 legislative session. Berglee’s bill, HB-494, to allow carrying “…a concealed weapon while patronizing a restaurant where alcoholic beverages are not the chief item of sale” was vetoed by Gov. Bullock. That, too, will return to the legislative menu next year.


• Long scheduled multi-day gun shows are being held in Kalispell and Missoula. (Trivia note. In the late ‘seventies, I was kicked out of the Kalispell gun show for taking photographs.)

I’m not optimistic that much will come of all this pro-stricter firearms control enthusiasm and activity. Marches and rallies energize people, but they don’t change laws and regulations. If the ralliers truly want to make a difference, they’ll donate to and work for political candidates who share their values and ideas for reducing firearms violence. But there are few quick fixes, and certainly no quick big fixes.

There’s no widespread agreement on how dangerous America is, or on how to define a safer American. Is a level of public safety that allows a unarmed husband and wife to take their family on a walk through their neighborhood without fear of being mugged best attained through professional law enforcement? Or is it best attained by equipping everyone with a sidearm to deter, and if necessary, shoot, a mugger? The answer differs from neighborhood to neighborhood, from neighbor to neighbor. Without a consensus on what constitutes safety, there cannot be agreement on the public policy that must be adopted to achieve that safety.