In states where this effort has been successful, crime rates (in terms of violent confrontation) have fallen so dramatically even the media can no longer deny it.

Advocates of the right to own and carry weapons rendered cynical by years of watching media act as a fourth branch of government, rather than its adversaries as Jefferson intended, are inclined to wonder why the hairsprayheads have decided, unprecedentedly, to tell the truth. I suspect an answer lies in a troubling aspect of concealed carry I've attempted to warn gunfolk about previously.

When I entered the argument three and a half decades ago, the issue where both sides were concerned was registration and licensing. Antigunners wanted every firearm in the country listed in government directories, every user required to obtain written permission to exercise his Second Amendment rights—rights to be converted into privileges, revocable upon the whim of politicians and bureaucrats.

Antigunners were unsuccessful until 1968, when, grotesquely stampeded by the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King (I don't recall any similar outrage on the part of the media over the shooting of George Wallace), government began enforcing the registration of weapons, new and used, at the point of retail sale, under Lyndon Johnson's Omnibus Crime Control Act.