Good Gun News

This really irked me, and now it's being fixed.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted to prohibit the confiscation of legally owned guns during an emergency like last year's Hurricane Katrina, marking another victory for the gun lobby.

By a vote of 84-16, the Senate embraced an amendment by Sen. David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican. He attached his measure to a domestic security spending bill for the fiscal year starting October 1 that the Senate is expected to pass soon.

The U.S. House of Representatives has passed its version of the spending bill and negotiators will have to decide whether to keep the gun provision. The House is usually sympathetic to gun owners.

Citing the constitutional right to bear arms, Vitter said that during an emergency people should be allowed to hold onto "legally possessed firearms to defend your life, your property" at a time when telephone lines and cell phones probably are not operating and victims "can't reach out to law enforcement authorities."
...
Sen. Richard Durbin (news, bio, voting record), an Illinois Democrat, added, "You send the National Guardsmen in ... and then snipers start shooting at them and the police make it known this is going to be a gun-free zone. We don't want any National Guardsmen killed because of this national emergency, this disaster. Is that an unreasonable thing?"

Yes, it's totally unreasonable! I don't want to be killed by some looter because some cop freaked out and took my legal guns to protect soldiers.

That's a little backwards, isn't it? Making law-abiding citizens less safe to protect the government forces that were sent in to supposedly protect the citizens in the first place?

Vitter countered that the "declaration or state of emergency in and of itself does not give anyone the right to confiscate guns" and local law enforcement officials should not "trump" the Constitution.

Duh.

I don't recall a codicil in the Constitution stating local law enforcement can selectively overrule the Bill of Rights on a whim.

By the way, Concealed Carry laws have been continuously won over the last two decades, showing the hard work of the NRA against HCI (has anyone heard from them lately?), so that now 2/3 of all states will allow all eligible citizens to carry concealed guns, and only 2 states still disallow it outright.

See the map!

And yet the Wild West has not broken out!

This is essentially a complete inversion of the situation over the last thirty years, and is perhaps one long-term sign that statist progressivism has already begun to ebb from its high water mark.