Caleb and Henigan

Follow the link here to see Caleb’s performance, which I thought was pretty good. We know the talking points now for the Brady Campaign, which is that these databases being public is important to be able to weed out people who were erroneously granted permits despite criminals records. Let me say that if this is the Brady Campaign’s primary concern, they should have been the first group to call the Times Herald to convince them not to publish the database.

No one would have objected to the newspaper, or anyone else for that matter, picking through the database and finding people who were erroneously issued carry permits who legitimately were not qualified to have them. It’s going to be a very small number of people who fit that mold, because applicants are already pre-screened for criminal records. The idea that you need to publish the entire database, 99.9% of which are people who are legitimately qualified to have them, is utter hogwash.

Indiana, along with many other states, has had gun permits as public records for a long time. In Indiana’s case, for decades. No one ever complained about it being that way until the Herald Times chose to publish those names. Gun owners are powerful enough to demand that law now be changed. The Bradys, newspapers, and other anti-violence groups have had access to that data for a long time, and could have been going through it looking for people who legitimately had criminal records that disqualified them. But they didn’t, which I think says something about their true motives.