In "Defense" of the 2nd Amendment

A day late but hopefully not a dollar short!

Travelling this past weekend to the 'Wild West' of Las Vegas, I was reminded of how different some locations can be from the familiar. Gun enthusiasts and gun control are opposite sides of the spectrum as is the approach taken by both sides.

My husband participated in Movember this past month, and decided that he needed to run the Las Vegas marathon with a costume - as Lt Dangle from "Reno: 911" and his mustache was the perfect touch. He was the hit of the race with the participants, crowd, and especially law enforcement.

While working on his costume for the race in the hotel room, an interesting question was raised. Whatever would he do with his "handgun?" Would he be deemed a danger by those out to "protect and serve"? A quick search of Google proved the state of Nevada is "open carry" meaning that he shouldn't have any issues from anyone with his foam cutout 9MM (and check out that trigger discipline!).

I was curious regarding the crime rates of states like Nevada, who have more lenient gun control laws, versus states like California, which are for more restrictive. Texas gun control laws lean towards more Nevada's, but fall somewhere in the middle. According to NeighborhoodScout.com, the numbers actually seem to support a more restrictive policy towards guns. California shows to have a lower violent crime rate than both Nevada AND Texas. Nevada shows 6.61 violent crimes per 1000 residents, Texas has 4.5 per 1000, and California is reported with 4.41 violent crimes per 1000 residents. The numbers are rather surprising when one hears about football game -related stabbings just involving the Oakland Raiders!

Of course, we still fall behind other nations in security at places like airports. When I first landed in Brindisi, Italy in 1997, I was met by two uniformed Italian Military Police, M16s in hand. Of course, that may have been to deter Mafia activity (Brindisi is a very busy port city in the southeast part of the country) but the security was not apparent at any other foreign entry point in the city.

Also, one has to question the validity of any attack on Constitutional 2nd Amendment rights. The Democratic Party voted to remove any mention of gun control from the 2008 platform. Maybe if people actually read and did research they may notice things do change - and not always in a bad way!