By Karen L. MacNutt,
Contributing Editor

Some of you undoubtedly live in rural areas. There, pick up trucks with rifles slung across the back windows are a common sight. Some of you live in communities where people can, and do, carry handguns openly with no need for a license. A select few of you who are Vermonters or Alaskans might ask, "Why would anyone need a license to carry a gun?" Most of you, however, live in urban areas where gun ownership has become an almost clandestine activity. Even if it is lawful, carrying a gun openly would be considered gauche.

Any number of articles have been written on carrying concealed guns. Proper clothing is essential. If your clothes are too tailored, and you try to carry a concealed gun, you are apt to look like you have a really large tumor. The growing number of people who carry cell phones, however, has made the strange bulge caused by a concealed gun less conspicuous. Still, having a barrel hang down below your jacket hem is destructive to a chic image.

There are good reasons to carry a gun concealed. It prevents you from having to answer numerous questions from nervous policemen and security guards. Bank tellers feel more comfortable when waiting on you. You avoid upsetting people who may not understand why you want to carry a gun. On the whole, you are showing that you are sensitive to the feelings of those around you. The mark of a gentle person (that is someone with breeding and manners) is that they never intentionally cause distress to others.

As laws expanding the right to carry concealed guns become more popular, anti-gun newspapers sometimes threaten to "expose," by publication, the names of people with gun licenses. "Exposing" people who have been investigated and found to be model citizens would hardly seem newsworthy. Obviously such newspapers are appealing to people's prejudice on slow news days. Publishing a list of gunowners is the equivalent of a newspaper headline stating, "Corruption in Mayor's Office not found."

Gunowners tend to be private people. Their immediate response to the threat of having their name published in a newspaper is to seek legislation to prevent the publication. That first impulse, however, may not be the best policy. Privacy is not always a good thing.
Any list of gunowners is going to be large. Throughout the United States gun ownership averages from a low of about 20% of the households to a high well above the national average of 50%. Even in eastern, liberal strongholds, a list of gunowners would take up considerable space in the newspaper. That space represents a lot of space lost to advertising revenue.

There is not much for gunowners to be concerned with if these lists are published. When was the last time you read, in detail, a long list of names? In some communities, the list will be almost as long as the voter list. In other communities, where licenses are hard to get, it might be interesting to know how many contributors to the mayor's campaign fund were given licenses as compared to how many ordinary citizens were turned down.

Individual gunowners do not lose much by having a list of license holders made public. The police already know who you are. Your name is not private from the government. If you talk to your friends, neighbors or relations, they probably already know you have an interest in guns. You would be shocked to learn how much your neighbors know about you, even if they never talk to you.

If your neighbors do not already know you are a gunowner and find out through the newspapers, one of two things will happen. Either they will come over to talk guns with you, or they will never come near you again. If they come over to talk guns, you will make a new friend and your position in the neighborhood will be stronger. If they are a current gunowner, you may end up with a new shooting buddy. If they are just curious but have an open mind, it will give you a chance to introduce them to the hobby. The more common gun ownership is among good people, the harder it is for anti-gun forces to create an atmosphere of fear. People are afraid of the unknown.

If your neighbors dislike guns, on the other hand, they will stay away from you. You and they probably do not have much in common anyway. If your children play with theirs, then the rules governing home visits will be set up quickly. No one will be able to say, "I did not know they had guns in the house." Many gunowners teach their children about guns early in life under the belief that children who are educated about gun safety are less likely to get into trouble. On the other hand, people who do not like guns do not teach their children gun safety. Those children are taught that guns are naughty things that they have to stay away from. This, of course, piques the child's interest and increases the chance the neighbor's child will goad your child into doing something stupid.

Guns that are not in use should be stored in a safe manner. What is "safe" depends upon your circumstances. People who have children or irresponsible adults in the house have to take more precautions than those who live in a household of responsible adults.

The most often cited concern about publishing lists of gunowners is a fear of crime. If you were a criminal which house would you break into: the one where you know there are no guns, or the one that you know has an owner who carries a gun? Prof. James D. Wright of Tulane University, a noted sociologist, conducted a widely published survey of incarcerated felons about 20 years ago. Prof. Wright discovered that the thing that scared those bad guys the most, was the fear of meeting up with an irate, armed home owner. They did not fear the police. The police usually act in a professional manner if you are polite to them. That is so for polite motorists and for polite burglars. Home owners, however, are an unpredictable lot. They are often very angry if their home is invaded. Statistically, the bad guy's chance of being shot by an irate home owner is higher than his chance of being, caught, tried, convicted and sent to jail by the law. This finding is supported by Prof. John R. Lott, Jr.'s observation in his book, More Guns, Less Crime, that countries with a high percentage of gun ownership have fewer criminal home invasions than countries where gunownership is uncommon.

It is only common sense. If you were a bad guy, whose home would you invade? The little old lady with the Rottweiler who carries a gun, or the construction worker with a peace symbol? The fear that gunowners' homes will be targeted by bad guys if lists of gunowners are published, is overrated. Those who are exposed as not being armed, are in more danger. That realization could lead some people to have a change in attitude on gun ownership.

Do gunowners lose something if the lists of gun licenses are not public records? That is, do gunowners lose if the names of gun license holders are only known to the government? The answer is a resounding, "Yes."

First, when the list of gun license holders is kept from the public, we create a breeding ground for corruption. Without the light of public scrutiny, there is no way of knowing if the licensing authority is giving licenses based on political favoritism. There is no way of knowing if women or minorities are being systematically excluded. There is no way of knowing, in truly corrupt political systems, if people who are grossly unqualified to have license, are being given licenses so that they might protect illegal enterprises. When the licensing authority tells you to prove that you carry large sums of money if you want a license, as is the case in some areas where licenses are discretionary, how do you know if the officer wants to see your bank book or wants to know how "generous" you are? If no one is able to review what he is doing, how do we know he is honest?

Second, by keeping the names of license holders secret, we make it difficult to prove the honest citizen is being treated unfairly by the licensing process. For example, if the licensing authority says it requires all persons to have training, how do we know this rule is being applied to everyone? Many years ago, the Supreme Court struck down laws that required a literacy test for voting. Although literacy would seem to be necessary for an informed vote, the tests were not applied fairly. In some areas, the degree of difficulty and the standard of passage varied depending upon the ethnicity of the person trying to vote. Thus, a valid standard can be applied in an unconstitutional manner to produce prohibited discrimination. Without the ability to compare the way one applicant is treated as opposed to another applicant, there is no way of determining if the standard is applied fairly.

Although you would think that we had progressed beyond the stage where women are looked upon as being incompetent to handle dangerous things, there are still many people, both men and women, who have no confidence in a woman's ability to carry a gun to defend herself. There are still many places where road blocks are systematically placed in front of any woman attempting to get a firearms license. People who place these road blocks often believe they are doing the woman a favor. They presume the woman is incompetent. The cultural prejudice of this presumption is so deep, that often the person committing the act of discrimination would vigorously, and sincerely, deny any bias. The full picture can only be seen when the treatment of all applicants can be compared.

From the point of view of organized gunowners, prohibiting access to the names of licensed gunowners can be devastating. It isolates the individual gunowner and prevents their being organized. Many people think that all gunowners are sportsmen. Some of the most active supporters of gun ownership are not sportsmen, but small business owners or professionals. Gas station owners, liquor store owners, independent variety store owners and druggists, shop keepers and trades people of all kinds carry guns for the defense of their business. Many of these people are on the front lines of the war of good against evil. The most common cause of women getting killed in the work place is by murder. This is because many women are cashiers in small businesses where they are the only employee working in the store at night. They need, and deserve to have, a means of self defense.

Because many business owners are not sportsmen, they frequently have little contact with organized attempts to improve firearms laws. Being able to contact and organize the business community is very important to the political health of gunowners. It is also sometimes very revealing to discover that some community leaders who claim to be anti-gun are really elitists. That is, they think they should have guns but that no one else should.

Being able to identify and communicate with fellow gunowners is an important part of the political process that gunowners must engage in to defend their ability to own guns. Rather than trying to block newspapers from publishing the names of gunowners, we should send them thank you notes.