[il-talk] My Interview on WILL AM RE: people who are blind owning guns

[Kelly Pierce]

Ray,

Thanks for posting this.  The discussion was rather engaging.  I
haven’t made up my mind if the two callers had an anti-gun philosophy
or felt that blind people were incompetent oafs who cannot be trusted
with firearms.  There are irresponsible blind people as there are
irresponsible sighted people, like Nancy Lanza the mother of the New
Town shooter.  She failed to lock the guns in her household in a
secure place even though she was in the process of obtaining
guardianship and institutionalizing her 20 year old son because of
behavioral problems stemming from his autism.

Like you, I have had little interest in guns.  That all changed in the
summer of 2012 when a crime wave swept through my neighborhood that
continues to this day.  In June 2012, a 39 year old man was walking
his dog a few blocks from my home when another man passed him by,
grabbed him from behind and slit the victim’s throat with a knife that
had a 10 inch blade.  The victim lost massive amounts of blood and
required 40 stiches.

A few months later in September 2012, an assistant state’s attorney
walking to the lake to go fishing was attacked by two teens with a
broken beer bottle after he told them to stop bullying a couple of gay
men.  They punched him to the ground then kicked him and cut him with
the bottle in the face and around the shoulder and arm.

In life threatening attacks like these, we as Americans have a
constitutional birthright to carry a firearm for self-protection.
This birthright does not magically disappear when someone becomes
blind or has a physical disability.  When the Supreme Court said in
2010 that Chicago’s ban on firearm ownership was unconstitutional, the
city enacted an ordinance that required people to register their
handguns.  However, an applicant had to have the visual acuity
required to obtain a driver’s license to receive a gun registration
permit.  Earlier this year, the state passed a concealed carry law
that preempts all local gun laws, effectively eliminating the
blindness gun exclusion in Chicago.

Passing a live fire test is required to carry in Illinois.  The first
person to obtain a concealed carry permit in the United States, Carey
McWilliams, successfully passed such a test to obtain his North Dakota
permit.  He describes the process and his life in general in his book
“Guide dogs and guns: America's First blind marksman fires back,”
available from NLS.  As blind Americans, our personal freedoms are
almost endless.

Kelly





On 9/17/13, Robert A.Hansen <roberthansen33 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This interview was positive.  Good job.
>
> RH
>
> Sent from Yahoo! Mail on Android
> Robert Hansen
> co program director WZRD 88.3 FM www.wzrdchicago.org
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