Archive Observations on Minnesota (MN) Carry Permit Training and Related Matters
This is the Observations archive; the page was just getting too long.JR
News—updated September 24, 2005
A few quick bits of news and short essays, that don't quite fit anywhere else.Or, in this case, a longish one.
I just sent the following to the Activism Mailing list. If you're interested in joining the list, go to here. Meanwhile...
The New Instructor Certification Regulations
How they happened, and what's next
Apologies in advance; I told you this was going to be long, but I didn't realize quite how long until I started it. And, at that, I had to leave a lot of stuff out, that's been explored on the LiveJournal, the Forum and elsewhere.The purpose of this essay is to explore, in some detail, how the new instructor certification organization rules in Minnesota came about, and what they mean for both Minnesota carry permit instructors and people who want to get carry permits -- and for the future of legislative activism around these issues in Minnesota.
Before the beginning
Let's start before the beginning: for three decades before 2003, Minnesota was a "may issue" state, in which carry permits were issued at the almost unfettered discretion of local authorities -- police chiefs, in those places that had police chiefs; sheriffs everywhere else.It was a mess. I don't think I could describe the situation better than Sheriff Steve Borchardt did, in mid-2003, so I'll just point you to his speech to an anti-gun group. You'll find both text and audio right here.
Read it before you go on; I'll wait.
Fixing the law in 2003
The short form, for those of you don't want to read it, is that it was necessary to change the pre-2003 law into one where people could get carry permits based on objective criteria, not the unfettered discretion of people like some police chiefs, who refused to issue carry permits to anybody, because they didn't think that citizens were ever responsible enough to protect themselves.But how to do it? What, exactly, would the law say? It was clear from the failed attempts in previous years that there would have to be some training requirement, as many people who wanted to support reform in the legislature wouldn't support it without some required training.
Training requirements
But what kind of training? Leave the training requirements in the hands of people like some of the obstructionist sheriffs and police chiefs — like the one in Minneapolis — and it was predictable that it would be something like 2000 hours of training, offered once every other year, if that. The chiefs and sheriffs had already proven that they would abuse their discretion; relying on their good faith was what had gotten the state into this mess in the first place.One obvious choice was NRA training. The NRA, after all, is recognized world-wide as the gold standard in firearms training, for both civilians and police officers. Which NRA training would be accepted? And should NRA be the only accepted organization?
The first one was a problem. The NRA had two relevant courses, at the time: Basic Pistol — which didn't cover self-defense — and Personal Protection in the Home, which didn't cover carrying a handgun in public. Which one of those would be required? Which one of those with the sheriffs have to accept? It wasn't clear — but it was clear that if the sheriffs were given any discretion at all, at least some of them — the ones who had been acting in bad faith all these years — would claim that since there was no Minnesota-specific NRA carry course, they simply wouldn't have to issue permits if the applicant presented an NRA certificate. Besides, if NRA was the only acceptable training, that would both look like a political payoff — it wouldn't have been, but would look that way — and, hey, this is America: competition is good. It's good for the country, and it's good for the NRA.
Enter AACFI
The American Association of Firearms Instructors was a corporation founded by Joe Olson and Tim Grant, two prominent activists in the carry reform community — Joe is, among other things, the President of the Gun Owners Civil Rights Alliance, of which CCRN is a subsidiary. Joe, a professor of law at Hamline University, was one of the people helping Lynda Boudreau, the House author of the bill, to write it. (And, again, for the record: I'm not now and have never been an officer, employee, principal of or spokesman for AACFI.)Joe and Tim decided to not only create an organization, but to produce a Minnesota-specific carry course. There were several reasons for that. Among them, of course, was the perfectly reasonable thing that many Americans do of starting a business — nothing wrong with that. Another reason is that they felt that a Minnesota-specific carry course would be a good thing, and be good and appropriate competition for the NRA.
Yet another reason was to provide a Minnesota-specific carry course, that — if AACFI was written into the law — the sheriffs would simply have to accept. There was no ambiguity as to which AACFI course would be the one that the law meant — there would be, at least at first, only one.
Skip the stuff in the next section; if you'd like. It's just about me. I'm not important in all of this, but I was involved, in a minor way, and if I'm going to talk about what went on, it's only fair that I, once again, put my involvement on the record. Again. Redundantly.
Stuff about Joel; not important, but just for the record
(This is, by the way, where I come in. I'd been involved in carry reform for a few years, and was the only professional writer Tim and Joe knew who also knew anything about firearms. So Tim and Joe asked me to write a book on the subject, on which they would base the course.(With a lot of help — from David Gross and Joe, mainly, who gave me many pointers on the legal aspects — I did that, although I should point out that I also had a lot of help on the research from my wife, Felicia, who is both a professional librarian and the best online researcher I know, and had access to a lot of relevant databases. I did actually a lot more writing than I might have had to; as a matter of ethics, I based my writing on the specifics of the bill from what was published on the web. While this prevented me from having an inside track on the constantly-changing legislation — the only information I had was open to the public, after all — it did mean that I had to keep changing the draft of the book as the bill kept changing as it went through committee after committee, and new changes kept getting published on the web.
(It was, to say the least, a fair amount of work. But it did mean that I would be able to provide a book on the subject of carry in Minnesota as quickly as possible after the bill became the law. And I did. With the help of Tim and Joe, I also wrote the first AACFI carry course, based on the book. None of that, as I've had to say over and over again, was done as an employee, or as a work for hire; I'm a writer, by trade, and this wasn't the first — or even the 10th — book that I've written on spec, hoping to recoup my investment of time from royalties, when it was sold, just as I was to — and have gotten — royalties on the course, when it's been taught by AACFI instructors. Not to worry; I did fine.
(As a result of all that I ended up as both an AACFI Instructor, and AACFI Certifying Instructor. Shortly after that, I also took training with NRA Training Counselors Tom Steele and Terry Bernier to become an NRA-certified instructor in Basic Pistol, First Steps, Personal Protection, Home Firearms Safety, and an NRA Certified Range Officer.)
The MCPPA passes
And so, on April 28, 2003, the first Minnesota Citizens Personal Protection Act was passed, to take effect one month later, and training started.Again, though — what training would the sheriffs accept? The law said that they had to accept both AACFI and NRA training — but there was still the very real possibility that they would decide that the law really didn't "mean" NRA Basic Pistol, or NRA Personal Protection, but some other, hypothetical course that the NRA eventually was going to write.
But the sheriffs weren't stupid. If they started turning down NRA instructors' certificates, along with a bunch of angry NRA instructors and angry NRA instructors' students, they would have to deal with the fact that they had to accept the AACFI course — and that, if they played games with that, Joe, being an attorney, could easily take them to court, and win... and the law had cleverly prescribed that if a sheriff was overturned on a denial, he would have to pay the attorneys fees.
If the sheriffs turned down NRA certificates, all that would do would drive instructors and carry permit applicants to AACFI — a private organization, run by two of the people who had helped take the sheriffs' unfettered discretion away from them.
The sheriffs didn't much like that. Don't take my word for it: ask Sheriff Fletcher in Ramsey County, or Sheriff McGowan in Hennepin. They liked the old law just fine, and strongly opposed reform. Ask Steve Borchardt, then the head of the Minnesota Sheriffs Association — he testified repeatedly against carry reform.
Forgetting, just for a moment, any other issues, turning down NRA and AACFI instructors' certificates would have created a real nightmare for the sheriffs and their pocketbooks. So they got together with the BCA — then and now a division of the Minnesota Department of Public Safety — and came up with a workaround: the BCA would publish a list of both certified instructors — those instructors that the sheriffs would have to accept — and add on to that list any other instructors, regardless of certification, who could persuade the BCA that they had a good course, and "validate" them all.
Like many compromises, it was a little ugly and awkward, but it worked just fine. The BCA validated list included both certified instructors — ones that the sheriffs had to accept — and other instructors who the sheriffs didn't have to accept, but who the sheriffs had agreed to accept. Eventually more than 300 instructors ended up on the BCA validated list.
It doesn't end there. Unfortunately.
The monkey wrench
Things were going just fine until June of 2004, when Judge Finley in Ramsey County ruled the Personal Protection Act unconstitutional — not on its merits, but on the way it was passed — and threw a monkey wrench into the whole thing, once again allowing the sheriffs the unfettered discretion that they had so long had, and which many of them quite clearly enjoyed. The expectation throughout the community was that this ruling would be overturned by the Appeals Court...... but it wasn't. In mid-April of this year, 2005, the Appeals Court upheld Judge Finley's decision.
Fixing the law. Again. Dammit.
It was not a fun time. And there were many differing opinions as to what to do. Some people took the position that this could not be handled this last legislative session, and that the thing to do was wait until the 2006 legislative session, and repass the law under the very strong political pressure of the upcoming election. Initially, among others, Speaker Swiggum took that position. He wasn't alone; the highest levels of the NRA took the same position. I respect Speaker Swiggum and the NRA greatly, but I disagreed with them. I don't think their positions were ill-considered, honest; I just disagreed.Others disagreed, too. CCRN/GOCRA, headed by Joe Olson, felt strongly that this could be fixed during the 2005 legislative session — if enough work was done. Larry Howes, in the Minnesota House, and Pat Pariseau in the Minnesota Senate, agreed. The Personal Protection Act was reintroduced, although it was late in the session, and work began to get it to the floor, and get it passed and to the Governor to sign.
Two things were happening at the same time. The first was this: a Senate committee — Crime and Public Safety, chaired by Leo Foley and co-chaired by Wesley Skoglund — was holding a hearing on the bill, and was expected to — and did — tack on a bunch of amendments intended by opponents of carry reform to gut the bill into uselessness.
Joe Olson, in fact, testified in front of that Senate committee — he was not the only one — and was, I think it's fair to say, raked over the coals by Senator Skoglund, who (unfairly, in my opinion; see above) portrayed the instructor certification language in the original bill as some sort of political favor that had been done for AACFI, Joe's company. (Again: see above. The existence of AACFI in 2003, had, I believed then, and still believe, worked to the benefit of AACFI instructors, of NRA instructors, and of unaffiliated instructors, as it had been the motivation for the BCA validation scheme that worked so well for a year and a half. Senator Skoglund disagrees; he's wrong.)
As unpleasant as that was for Joe to endure — and it clearly was — or to watch (I've seen the hearings online, and it was painful), what was going on in the Senate committee was, basically, chin music. Noise, and little more. There was no question that Senator Skoglund's committee would gut the bill, and that amendments would have to be proposed on the floor to fix it. The only questions were how much gutting, and how much fixing.
That was the other thing that was going on at the same time.
There was also no secret about that; that was discussed openly on my LiveJournal, among many, many other places. Senator Pariseau was negotiating and discussing issues with many stakeholders — the self-defense community, largely represented by CCRN/GOCRA; the law enforcement community, largely represented by the Minnesota Sheriffs Association; other legislators; and lots of other folks — what compromises from her original bill and the original law would be substituted as an amendment for the crippled bill that came out of Senator Skoglund's committee.
Like it or not, that's the way legislation is made: negotiation, compromise, and buy-in. Lousy system, I think, but it does have the virtue of being a lot less lousy than any other I know of.
A lot of other things were going on, as well. Among them, the small, pseudo-grassroots organization that calls itself "Citizens for a Safer Minnesota" was pushing very hard to make the bill die in committee, and if that couldn't happen, to have a badly compromised version of the law reach the floor. And, in fact, they argued in favor of just that both publicly and privately, and while they didn't get the bill killed, they did get a gutted bill out of Senator Skoglund's committee, as they wanted, although not gutted quite as much as they would have liked.
But again: that didn't matter. The bill was headed for the floor of the Senate, where it could be fixed.
Enter Scott Bach, Part I
Another thing that was going on was this: I had called up my friend Scott Bach, an NRA national Board member, told him everything that I knew, and encouraged him to advocate for the NRA getting involved in pushing for legislative reform during this session. There's a lot that's good about the NRA, and I'm proud to be a member of it, but it's very rare — and very difficult — for the NRA to move quickly on state matters. (It's not unknown, of course; recent events around the unlawful seizures of firearms in New Orleans proved that. Well done, NRA.) At some point, however, NRA national did get peripherally involved in this, and urged repassage during the 2005 session, although their involvement wasn't extensive.The heavy lifting in April-May 2005
But most of the heavy lifting was being done by local activists, largely CCRN/GOCRA. As I said, NRA involvement in the passage was minimal — Larry Howes, for example, didn't even get an encouraging phone call (or any phone call) from NRA, much less any help. That's a matter of public record; Larry said that on the floor of the House.The plans for a floor vote in the Senate moved forward.
The 2005 bill is put together
There were many different possible approaches. The one I favored — and said so at the time — was to, if it all possible, put in a stronger law, without many of the compromises that went into the 2003 law. But others — others who could, by the way, count votes better than I can — felt that the way to go was to make just a very few tweaks to the 2003 law, both to fix a minor problem with the posting language and — and here's where the problem starts — try to get the Minnesota Sheriffs Association on board to support the repassage, even though the same Association had steadfastly opposed carry reform for years and years and years.Enter the Sheriffs Association
I wasn't privy to any of the negotiation or discussions; remember, I'm an independent activist, and not a lobbyist for any group. I do know that the leadership of CCRN/GOCRA, particularly Joe and Tim, had many meetings with many legislators and with the sheriffs, trying to come up with language that would be passable on the floor, and would get the sheriffs on board. (Those efforts were eventually successful; the sheriffs association did, eventually, issue a letter in support the bill that actually passed. More on that in a while.)One of the compromises that was agreed to — which I think is philosophically a bad idea, but which I believe also was necessary to get the sheriffs to support repassage — was to give off-duty cops an exemption from all of the restrictions that civilian carry permit holders have. The 2003 law had, basically, put off-duty cops and civilians with carry permits in the same basket: neither could carry while intoxicated, carry into schools without explicit written permission from the schools, ignore posting signs, etc.
That went away. The cops were exempted from all of those restrictions in the new bill. I haven't seen any reports of offduty cops carrying drunk in schools, say, so the sky hasn't fallen there. But I still think it was bad idea to make that lawful, even as a condition of getting the Minnesota Sheriffs to issue a support letter.
New instructor certification language added. Not a good thing.
And then, at some point, a new feature — I think it was a bug — was added: rather than the workable language that we talked about above about who could train carry permit applicants, the right to certify — and to not certify — carry permit training organizations was given to the DPS, at the insistence of the sheriffs. Rather than the "validation" workaround that had worked so well, the sheriffs very much wanted the DPS to have the ability to be the gatekeeper for carry permit training, and to have it at the organizational level.I first found out that that language was going to be in the bill on the day that the Personal Protection Act Bill went to the floor of the Senate.
I thought that was a bad idea. Still do. The ability to certify or decertify organizations should not, I thought, be left in the hands of political appointees — even good political appointees. I wasn't concerned particularly about what might happen under the Pawlenty administration — Governor Pawlenty was and is a strong supporter of carry reform — but there was no question in my mind that Governor Pawlenty will not always be the Governor of the State of Minnesota, and previous governors have been anti-reform. If Governor Pawlenty's successor is anti-reform, the sort of mischief that such a Governor could perform is obvious.
Imagine, just to get political for a moment, what the requirements for certifying instructor organizations would be under a Governor David Lillehaug and a Commissioner of Public Safety Wesley Skoglund.
Bad idea, I thought. I immediately went to Joe Olson and Tim Grant, making those concerns as strongly and as loudly as I could.
And, unsurprisingly, they agreed with me. Both Joe and Tim told me that when they had heard that this language was going to be in the amended bill, several days before, they had argued strongly against it.
I immediately went to Senator Pariseau with the same concerns. (Remember: this is within a two hours of the bill going to the Senate floor to be amended to something other than the gutted version that Senator Skoglund's committee had passed on. I would have talked to Pat earlier, but I wasn't involved in the discussions. My role, in all of this, was and is an independent activist, not a lobbyist or legislator.) Despite being incredibly busy, she heard me out. But she expressed the view that the way the language was written, it would expand the number of instructors, and still satisfy the demands of the sheriffs.
And so the bill went to the floor of the Senate, and after a long debate, was passed in a bipartisan vote, and sent to the House where it was passed on May 18 in a bipartisan vote — it had been scheduled to be debated and voted on the day before, but a particularly nasty political dirty trick directed at me (see this) delayed the passage for a day.
The 2005 law passes
The bill was passed, with the new instructor certification language and the sweetheart deal for law enforcement officers, and went to the Governor for signature; several days later, he signed it.It was now the law. Instructors certified under the 2003 law were grandfathered in until October 1; by then, DPS was to have its new instructor certification regulations in effect.
New instructor organization regulations
The responsibility of writing at least the regulations landed on the desk of Special Agent in Charge Jeff Luther, of the BCA. SAC Luther was given the task of writing the regulations, which would be given to DPS Commissioner Campion for final approval.Since I'm going to have to talk about what SAC Luther did, let me preface it with this: I've talked to SAC Luther several times. I've said — both to him and behind his back — that he impresses me as a good, solid, service-oriented, no nonsense cop. I happen to like good, solid, service-oriented, no-nonsense cops. I disagree with him on some things and agree with him on others, but there is no doubt in my mind that he operates professionally, and in good faith. I'm not sure that there is a villian in all of this, but if there is, it isn't Jeff Luther.
I think things could possibly have gone the way Senator Pariseau had intended... but possibly not. Depends on how you read the language of the bill.
And who else got involved.
Enter the MSA. Again.
SAC Luther set about doing his job: writing proposed regulations. He received a set of proposals from the Minnesota Sheriffs Association as to what they thought those regulations should look like.That set of proposals looked a lot like watered-down POST training — to be a little ungenerous: the sheriffs clearly think of civilians carrying handguns for self-defense too much as sort of junior cops, and uppity junior-grade wanna cops, at that. They're well-meaning, I'm sure, but they're wrong.
The sheriffs wanted to be sure that the civilians got training remarkably similar to some of what cops have to get in order to enforce the law, although civilians do not have the many of the same issues that cops have. (More on that another time. Short form: cops carry guns largely to enforce the law, by arresting people who break the law. Cops can use all sorts of force in effecting arrests, and the rules are involved, and complicated, and require a lot of training. Civilians, by and large, would be very foolish to go around trying to arrest people, and any responsible carry permit course would advise civilians to avoid trying to arrest people if at all possible. It's almost always possible to avoid. Really.)
Minnesota Sheriffs Association meetings create proposed regulations
The Sheriffs Association invited SAC Luther and several other people to meetings at the Sheriffs Association headquarters in Woodbury. You'll find an account of those meetings right here — and more information elsewhere on the LiveJournal. I know some of the details of two such meetings; there were apparently several more MSA meetings that I don't know much about, other than that they happened.Several people went into the meetings at the Sheriffs Association; the Sheriffs Association proposal was tweaked some, and the proposed regulations — available here — came out.
Take a look at them.
There were some problems with the proposed regulations, stemming from both changes in the law, and perhaps the interpretation of them. Instead of instructors being able to apply to the BCA themselves to be validated, with a guarantee that if the BCA was unreasonable, they could simply go get certified by AACFI or NRA, instructors would have to jump through a fair number of hoops and become certifying organizations themselves, or join another instructor certifying organization.
How much of a problem that would be would depend entirely on the BCA/DPS.
But, even under a reasonable administration, like the Pawlenty one, there would be many certainly competent instructors who would have to do a fair number of additional things — like be prepared to train other instructors and certify them, train them in things like holster retention, write extensively on and justify their chosen methods of teaching adult learners, and so forth — even if the only thing that they wanted was to keep teaching the same classes that they had been teaching, without getting involved in the certification business. There were discussions about what "regular business practices" are and should be, as though the MSA and the BCP/DPS were trying to become the Chamber of Commerce or something.
And at least some of the instructor certification requirements pretty clearly made it impossible for NRA instructors to become certifying organizations themselves without doing a lot of of additional things beyond that. There were hoops to jump through; how high the hoops would be in practice was going to depend on the occupant of the office of Commissioner of Public Safety.
All this was rule tweaking was happening in the private meetings at the Sheriffs Association. The proposed rules were not made public, but were discussed among the people invited to the meetings. Some folks have, I think, attributed some bad faith to that. I'm not going to — there's also the very good argument that a small group can more quickly and effectively work out the kinks than huge public meetings could.
Regardless of why, that's what happened.
The proposed rules become public
Then word leaked out — that's another story for another day, and it's kind of a funny one; remind me, sometime — and the proposed regulations became a matter of public comment and debate.Which is where many people come into the story.
Me, for example.
(Some people — me included — would have liked to have come into this somewhat earlier. I'd left a message at DPS, shortly after the law passed, requesting, as a private citizen, to be invited to any meetings on proposed regulations. Never did hear from them; and, of course, they didn't have to call me, or anybody else. After all, these meetings weren't DPS/BCA meetings — they were Sheriffs Association meetings, and there's no reason that MSA Executive Director Jim Franklin would have invited an independent activist that he'd never heard of to his meetings.)
Enter Scott Bach. Again, thankfully
When I was copied on the proposed regulations, I posted them publicly — and made another call to Scott Bach, asking for his help. It seemed to me that the interests of NRA instructors and the related interests of carry permit applicants had not been properly addressed in the proposed regulations, and that NRA and NRA instructors had, in fact, not been represented at the meetings at the Sheriffs Association.I thought those interests — and the interests of citizens of Minnesota to have the choice, among others, of NRA instructors for their carry permit training — needed to be addressed.
Scott agreed, and started making phone calls.
Lots of phone calls. If you want to look for a hero in all of this, look at Scott. As I said, above, getting NRA moving quickly is very difficult, even for an NRA national Board member. But time was ticking — if the rules were to be modified into something more reasonable, there wasn't much time.
Scott made more phone calls. This isn't a matter of him applying pressure — he updated the highest levels of the NRA on both the facts on the ground here, and analysis of what those facts meant for NRA instructors in Minnesota, and for NRA nationally, and he did that constantly, as facts on the ground changed.
To take an example out of literature, Scott was a combination of Nero Wolfe and Superman. He was in there analyzing facts — that's the Nero Wolfe part — and fighting for, to be blunt, truth, justice, and the American way. (In fairness to Scott, he looks nothing like Nero Wolfe, and eats far, far more sensibly; doesn't resemble Superman all that much, either, physically.)
My own role in this was minimal. I was Archie Goodwin to Scott's Nero Wolfe; Jimmy Olsen to his Superman. I gathered facts, checked them out, sourced them whenever possible, and reported them to Scott. (I don't look anything like Archie Goodwin or Jimmy Olsen, either, by the way.) Scott then conveyed both facts and analysis — complete with sources when possible — to NRA national, and urged them to work as hard as they possibly could to fix the problems with the proposed regulations.
Good news, and more opinions
Short form: NRA got involved. I don't know the specifics, but I do know from conversations both with Scott and with the Pawlenty administration, legislators, and others, that the highest levels of NRA communicated their concerns, very strongly, to many people.Many other individuals and groups were also expressing their opinions. Opinions, of course, varied. Opinions have a way of doing that. The people who I talked to who were involved in the discussions at the Sheriffs Association reported themselves as generally satisfied with what had come out of their meetings, usually with some reservations; others weren't happy at all. NRA instructors, from all over the state, expressed their concerns (and, at times, their frustration and irritation) that the skills of trained NRA instructors were not properly acknowledged in the proposed regulations, and that the additional hoops that we have just talked about would be quite possibly prohibitive for many people.
Scott Bach, again
Again, much of this was documented in realtime on the LiveJournal, as it happened. What wasn't documented there was Scott's role, and the NRA's role. There was a general sense in the community that NRA wasn't supporting its instructors, and some concern that as a practical matter, many NRA instructors who had been teaching very good carry classes for two years would be either locked into, large, non-NRA training organizations, or forced out of training, because of an inability to jump through all the hoops by themselves.Why wasn't Scott's role right out front? Easy: Scott felt that he would be most useful in this if he was feeding reliable information and sound analysis directly to the NRA privately, rather than publicly. I happen to agree with his analysis — but, even if I hadn't, it was his call, not mine.
I can now talk about his role publicly. Once the NRA got involved, and communicated with the highest levels of the Pawlenty administration, Scott's role in helping them get involved was done, and he kindly gave me permission to discuss his role both publicly, and privately.
A lot of people worked to help fix the proposed regulations, and, as previously discussed, the actual regulations — and the implementation of them under the Pawlenty administration — have been much more reasonable than many had been concerned about.
Where we are now.
Finally, eh?Here's where we are now: right now, it all appears to be working. There's been thirteen instructor organizations certified; there'll probably be another dozen or so next week. I'm guessing at least 50 by the end of the year. I strongly doubt that we'll end up with many fewer instructors than we had in 2004; we may even end up with more.
The sky isn't falling.
My own opinion — I can't prove it; but I can state it — is that we would have ended up with much more restrictive regulations, and a much less reasonable outcome, if NRA hadn't gotten involved, and that NRA wouldn't have gotten involved effectively without Scott's constantly updating and urging.
Take that for what it's worth. My own take is that everybody who benefits from the improvements in the regulations owes a thank you to the Pawlenty administration, the National Rifle Association, and NRA National Board Member — and, I'm pleased to say, my friend — Scott Bach.
The proof, as they say, is in the pudding. At the present time, 13 instructors certifying organizations have been certified by the DPS; more presumably will be over the next week or so, before the October 1 deadline.
The majority of the certifying organizations, so far, are led by NRA-certified instructors.
It seems unlikely that very many NRA-certified or other good non-NRA instructors who wish to keep teaching carry courses will in any way, in practice, be locked out under the present administration, and that the hoops that need to be jumped through will be modest and reasonable.
So everything's okay, right?
So, everything is just fine, and there's no need for any further activism on this issue?Well, no. Everything is not just fine. Everything appears to be pretty close to fine for the time being, but the key to this all having worked out is, still, the Pawlenty administration. The same law — and even the same regulations — could result in very different outcomes under a hostile administration. The requirements for instructor certification could become a bottleneck for carry permit training under a different administration.
And I think it's safe to predict that if the law isn't changed, at some point, they will. At some point, we will have a governor in the state of Minnesota who is not pro-self-defense. At that time, if we don't have protections written into the law and not just malleable regulations, we will see either the present regulations, or new regulations, used to reduce the number of Minnesotans who can get carry permits, simply by requiring exhaustive, irrelevant, certification rules for instructors.
Bottom line
And that, finally, is the bottom line. This has to be fixed, in statute, and it has to be done while we still have a reasonable, pro-self-defense administration, and a pro-self-defense House and Senate. I've had discussions on this with a number of folks, including some of the activists mentioned in this email, and not one of the activists has disagreed with me. (SAC Luther, quite properly, made no comment when I mentioned my position on that; it's not his job to advocate for or against legislation, and he didn't.)Next steps are the subject of the next Activism list email, and I expect will also be discussed extensively on the Forum, and elsewhere.
What should you do? It's up to you, of course; I don't get to decide what you do. I've got some suggestions, though, if you don't mind listening to them:
1. Write your thank you notes. The Pawlenty administration, the NRA, and Scott Bach did a lot of very important work on this that benefits everybody interested in self-defense in Minnesota. You owe them a thank you; pay up. You'll find Scott's website here. His email address is sbach@mindspring.com. Stamps are cheap, so is note paper. Electrons and bits cost even less. Courtesy and appropriate gratitude is important.
2. Don't go to sleep. There is going to be a need for some serious legislative activity next session — think about it, talk with others about it, and be prepared to do some work on it.
It's been a long few months, and the sky isn't falling...but it's not over.
On the other hand, this long essay is.
stay safe,
Joel Rosenberg
Activism List Administrator
March news, April and May classes, and such
I'm still teaching at least one Beginner-to-Carry course every month. Class size is limited—B2C must be taught with no more than a 5-to-1 student-teacher ratio, although I think 4-to-1 is better, but if enough people sign up early enough, I can get another B2C-qualified instructor in (almost certainly David Dyer-Bennet, who wrote the course with me), we can add onto that, if necessary.I've got the May schedule up now, and the April schedule will be along within a day or so.
Yeah, I know it's usually done in the other order, but Tony's waiting to hear back on a couple of locations for April, although May was easy to fill, and all the May classes (and probably almost all of the April ones) will be at the Dan Patch American Legion, in Savage. Nice place, nice folks, and just a short hop from the range for the qualification.
Meanwhile, not a lot's been happening locally, although I've been following what has on my LiveJournal.
The big news, such as it is, is that the Temporary Restraining Order—which permits churches party to the lawsuit to ban carry in their facilities by using whatever language that they choose rather than following the commonsense, simple-to-follow rules for posting—has been made "permanent," which means that it'll last until the case actually goes to court, although no date has been set for the hearings on it. It'll be quite awhile, though, that "Thou Shalt Not Have a Gun to Protect Thyself In These Premises" will work—for churches party to the lawsuit.
Yawn.
There's been quite a flurry of late, of some other trainers attempting to duplicate what I can do with the 28-state training, which is all to the good, I've got to say, even though I guess I should be irritated. The information is out there, and there's no reason that somebody who is NRA-certified for Personal Protection shouldn't take the time and trouble to do Florida, although there are elements of it that are kind of a pain. I hear that AACFI is working on getting Florida authorization for all of their instructors, too, although I don't know if that'll be backdated.
As for me, it's not a problem. Heck, research and writing instructions is something I've been doing in my other life for years.
And, while they say, "No man's life, liberty, or property is safe while the legislature is in session," this year, it's not going to be even a minor problem. As I've written before, the antis would need all of four things to repeal the MCPAA, and they've got precisely none of them, and are losing ground. There's a reason that no modern, mainstream, commonsense "shall-issue" permit law like the MCPPA has never even come close to being repealed, after all, and the manufactured publicity around a couple of old politicians holding an embarrassingly lightly-attended press conference hasn't changed that.
So, as usual:
Relax. The sky isn't falling.
Meanwhile, I think I've finally got access to a range where we can do the Point Shooting Workshop this summer, but I've got to beta-test the latest version, first. Watch this space. Should be a lot of fun—and will involve shooting at very close targets, at increasing speed andaccuracy, without using sights. (Really, truly: masking tape and cotton balls will be involved.)
Keep up with the journal, please; lots of fun stuff there. And see you next month, right here.
What's going on
Since I've been finding that, more and more, what I'm writing on the subject are shorter essays, I've started a LiveJournal. You can get there by clicking on the LiveJournal button on toolbar, to the left, or here. Check it out. One of the nice things about LiveJournal is that you can make online comments. Please do.Do See This
February 9, 2004Taking the Twin Cities Carry Course with me can now let you carry in twenty-seven states. See this.
As Requested
February 9, 2004Some of my present and former Twin Cities Carry Course students have asked that I make the shopping guide I give out in the Beginner to Carry (B2C) course more generally available.
Happy to oblige. It's right here in Adobe Acrobat format. While the B2C course specifies a DAO snubby revolver, I think they're also a very good choice for most people.
The Rally That Fizzled
February 2, 2004
This was to be their big day.
It wasn't.
Out of the supposed millions of Minnesotans supposedly opposed to the Minnesota Citizens Personal Protection Act—the carry bill—they were able to rally only a dozen. The six retired Moms from Duluth weren't able to come down for their usual protest-and-Mall-of-America-shopping trip.
And this, they trumpet as a great victory:
Citizens For A Safer Minnesota -- Repeal Rally sends the message!: "Repeal Rally sends the message! On the opening day of the legislative session, advocates braved the largest snowfall in years to send the message to lawmakers: Repeal Conceal. The conceal and carry gun law is one of the few issues that has so moved citizens to action, that it won't go away. In fact, more citizens than ever are involved. "
Err, but they only had ten or twelve of their people there (although they claimed a whopping two dozen). Well, I guess that's a huge increase from the typical three or four, but, sheesh...
The message?
Fizzle. Sput.
Whew! And Back to Normal
When things go wrong, they go wrong in a big way. Yes, I know that when I'm talking about that in my carry classes, I'm usually talking about what can happen with firearms, but it's true for computers, too.(If you're not interested in reading computer geekitry, skip on down. It's okay.)
About three weeks ago, the ellegon.com domain name came up for renewal. I've got the domain registered with gandi.net, a French company, and they dutifully sent me renewal notices a few weeks before.
Unfortunately, well, they're a French company, and most of the notice was in French. By the time my antispam program got to the English part, it had already decided that the message was spam, and deleted it.
So, on the anniversary of its original registration, ellegon.com dropped off the net. Email to me bounced; people who were looking to sign up for a class or read my articles got the 404: NOT FOUND messages, and so forth.
It gets worse, mind you.
No brag, just fact: besides word of mouth (the single most important form of advertising, particularly for things like carry classes), I get most of my students from google searches. If you search for "carry permit training," most of the time, you'll find that a couple of places on this website—including this very page— are the top results, from all over the planet.
That's both gratifying, and important, for obvious reasons. Ellegon.com is the most linked-to website for carry permit training, and quite a few people—and not just from Minnesota—stop by here, fairly frequently, to read my essays.
But google rankings don't just happen. Every now and then—just about monthly—the Google spider—their web-crawling program—comes through, to see if there's any new links, if there's been a change in content, and, most importantly, if the site is still up.
Yup. During the three hours that ellegon.com was down and off the net, Google came through, found it missing, and dropped me from their listings.
I'm pleased to report that everything has finally gotten back to normal, but, sheesh.
Department of "I Told You So"
A Chicagoan, who recently shot a burglar in his home, has been charged. Let's leave the question of what to do about a burglar in the bedroom for another time—but look at this."Billings [the burglar. JR], convicted last year of a similar home burglary in an affluent Minneapolis suburb, is now in the Cook County Jail with bail set at $3 million."As some of us predicted would happen in the wake of the MCPPA, Billings followed a small but real trend among criminals by moving his operation down to friendlier territory, where he could reasonably expect to practice his chosen profession more safely.
I guess that's too bad for residents of Illinois, but I'm perfectly willing for it to be their problem, rather than mine.
Ohio goes "shall issue."
From The Plain Dealer:Concealed-weapons bill heads for Taft's desk 01/08/04Neat. The big hassle in Ohio was over the confidentiality of permit holders' records, and the supporters of the bill had to compromise, or face a veto that they might not have been able to override. I'm not at all happy with the compromise—reporters will be able to get access to the list of permit holders, but nobody else. Sure—but at least they got the bill passed.
Julie Carr Smyth
Plain Dealer Bureau
Columbus- A bill lifting Ohio's 145-year-old ban on carrying concealed weapons cleared both the House and Senate on Wednesday with virtually no debate.It will become law 90 days after Gov. Bob Taft's promised signature. The Republican governor said the bill "balances the Second Amendment rights I have strongly supported with public safety and public records concerns."
There'll be time to revisit that after somebody, either a reporter or somebody posing as one, posts the list on the Internet.
It's a bad idea. Why on earth would you want, say, a woman's stalker to be able to find out if she's got a carry permit? Shouldn't it, well, come as a surprise to him?
Fortunately, we don't have this problem in Minnesota; in Minnesota, permit data is confidential, government data, as it should be.
But you can expect the antis in Ohio to have conniption fits.
But, really, they can relax; the sky isn't going to fall there, either.
Repeal; Relax—It Isn't Going to Happen
Occasionally, I get email from somebody worrying that the MCPPA is going to be repealed this next session. I think they've been listening to the antis—who, more and more, are acknowledging not only that that's not going to happen soon, but never will. No shall issue law has ever even come close to repeal.Realistically, the antis need all of four things in order to be able to repeal the MCPPA: a working majority in the State House, a working majority in the State Senate, a governor who wouldn't veto the repeal bill, and horror stories around permit holders.
They need all four. They've got precisely none.
Instead, they're pinning their hopes on some of the lawsuits from the churches, but those are a dead-on-arrival issue; the only thing left in the lawsuit that could happen is that churches might be able to use their own choice of language to forbid permit holders to carry ("Thou Shalt Not Have Handguns to Protect Thyself While Here") or keep permit holders out of their parking lots. That's it. The complaint that the MCPPA was part of an omnibus bill won't fly; the court can't afford to void omnibus bills, given how very much of necessary legislation only gets passed that way.
So, for once, I get to say the same thing to folks on my side of the issue that I keep repeating to the antis: relax; the sky isn't going to fall.
Check back often, though
I really should write a weekly column, and I'll try to move to that later. In the meantime, I'll try to update these notes from time to time, and add an essay or two. There's one on the hysterical hoplophobia that's taken over the Minnesota Science Fiction Society that's kind of begging for an essay, and I haven't been doing enough essays, I know.Speaking of which...
Honest, I Love My People, but . . . Oy.
Unfortunately, I'm informed that there is a synagogue posting "Defenseless Jews Inside" signs in the metro area. (No, that's not what the signs actually say, but . . . ) Argh. Hope that the local equivalent of Buford Furrow trips and breaks his neck on the way in.Then again, maybe they're lying, and he won't get three steps inside. I don't really believe that, but I can hope.
Honest, I love the Jewish people. Really, I do. But when it comes to gun issues, there's more than a little of what my grandmother would have called goyisher kopf going around. A gun is a tool; that's all. In some sorts of situations, it's an indispensable tool—you could, alas, get out an ouija board and ask Dru Sjodin about that, alas, as she didn't have one—but that's all it is.
I'd like to think that anti-gun hysteria is a liberal thing; I'm a neocon, so that would be comforting. But, alas, it isn't; going back to when we actually had a Civil Rights movement in this country, many of the Freedom Riders rode armed, and all of the ones who were murdered by the Klan didn't. Even these days, a goodly number of folks I know in the self-defense movement are liberal on social issues. (Actually, fwiw, so am I, on most. I'd find it awfully hypocritical to think that it's okay for a rape victim to get an abortion without permission, while thinking that there's something wrong with her being able to carry a gun to protect herself against a rapist in the first place.)
Which leads me to Bruce Schneier's essay.
Bruce Schneier on Guns in Cockpits: A Quick Fisking
I don't know how I overlooked this when it first came out. Part of it is my fault, alas.Bruce Schneier's rant on arming pilots is the sort of ugly thing that happens when an expert in one field first assumes that his expertise transfers to others, and then worsens the problem by letting his prejudices, or perhaps his spouse, do his thinking for him.
A few introductory points. Bruce Schneier is a world-famous expert on cryptography and computer security, who has parlayed that into quite a lot of fame on general issues of security. His monthly newsletter, sent free for the asking, blasts his thoughts to some tens of thousands of subscribers from the very server on which ellegon.com lives, by the way. (The world is a small place.)
In many cases, his expertise, combined with his often excellent mind, serves him quite well.
Alas—yes, I'm saying "alas" too much, but I'm immeasurably saddened by all of this—he's got a painfully stereotypical New York liberal Jew's view of handguns and firearms—the sort of "take one part fear, add two parts loathing, mix in a lot of hysteria, and then loudly assume that all intelligent people share your phobia" thing that I've discussed endlessly.
Think Woody Allen without the macho.
In fact, when the MCPPA passed in Minnesota, he made loud noises about not only leaving Minnesota, but the entire United States. (He quietly stopped talking so loudly about that fairly soon after, and hasn't moved.) And he's joined literally all but one of Minnesota's anti-gun zealots by declining to put up a "This Is A Gun-Free Home" sign on his home. Wise of him; why should he advertise to would be home invaders that they've got a soft target there? (In the computer world, they call this "security by obscurity." It works well, as long as nobody ever pays any attention.)
For my sins, I was, at the time Schneier's "go to guy" (his term, honest, not mine) on weapons-related matters. The notion of a billy club or taser was mine, sort of. Mea culpa, as the rebbes say. (Well, no, they don't. But...) In my own defense, the question I was asked was what weapons— absolutely excluding guns, no matter how sensible I thought the idea of an armed pilot was—that I'd recommend for last-ditch defense in the door of the cockpit.
He admitted, at the time, that he was utterly unwilling to consider solving a problem if the solution involved arming anybody with a firearm.
Which pretty much guaranteed which way the piece would go.
Although, even given that, it didn't have to be this bad.
At least he didn't go with his initial idea of giving the pilots pepper spray; do I have to point out how bad an idea it would be to dispense a cloud of pepper spray in an airplane's cockpit? I did, then.
The problem with somebody who doesn't know anything about the issues looking at the problem from a systems approach is classic: garbage in, garbage out. If you either miss or add complexities to the system, you end up with as silly conclusions as Bruce does here. In this sort of thing it's not just what you don't know that can screw you up, it's what you know that just ain't so. Having watched Hopalong Cassidy as a kid doesn't exactly qualify Schneier as an expert on firearms issues.
It's worth looking at. You'll be hard put to find a better-written example of somebody leveraging nonexistent expertise, assuming his conclusions, and ignoring the topic at hand—which, remember, is arming pilots to prevent erstwhile hijackers from taking over the cockpit, and ramming the plane into buildings.
"If I ran an airline, I would worry more about accidents involving passengers, who are much less able to survive a bullet wound and much more likely to sue."
Well, sure, on a day-to-day basis, kinda. Although what makes Schneier think that a typical passenger is more or less able to "survive a bullet wound" than a terrorist is more of that nonexistent expertise being presented as fact. A single bullet is, in this context, almost certain to result in death if it enters the brain, the heart and/or lungs, or breaks enough major arteries, and unlikely to otherwise, given rapid medical response; a hijacker is not particularly likely to have an armored aorta, after all. (And who is more likely to get rapid first aid? A downed passenger, or a downed hijacker?)
But put that aside—remember the context that we're talking about here: a last-ditch cockpit-door stand against a plane being hijacked, after all other countermeasures have failed. Only an idiot, or an anti-gun zealot, is going to worry about injuries to passengers or lawsuits over passenger injuries in the context of preventing a plane from been hijacked and slammed into the nearest convenient large building. It's like worrying about place settings on the Titanic—just after it's hit the iceberg.
It gets worse, though, when we get into the "real dangers."
"How does the pilot get the gun?"
Well, there's any number of ways. One of the simplest ones would be to just use the same procedures that air marshals use to get their guns on the plane: they carry them, in their holsters, concealed by their covering garments. They present proper ID at the proper places, and just plain carry them. A more conservative approach—and the one that's actually being used—is to have the pilots carry their guns aboard the plane in a locked gunbox. The pilot and the gunbox are safely ensconced on the flight deck, with the door locked, before the plane ever takes off.
Still, let's turn to his theoretical worry. Does he really think that it's easy to spot a "gun on a hip" when concealed by a jacket- or suit-coat? I don't know anybody who spends more time on airplanes than Schneier does, but he's never reported spotting an air marshal, although it's statistically absurd to expect that he's never been on a plane with one. Why? Well, they carry reasonably discreetly, and even if Schneier was looking for one, he wouldn't find one. (He's never spotted me carrying, either, and, except when I was at his wedding, he's never seen me unarmed—when I attended his wedding, some years ago, I wanted to have more than a few drinks, and just checked my handgun with hotel security. And he thinks that I carry frequently, in spite of being told that I carry everywhere it's legally permissable.)
Problem? Nah. Not in reality—and this is a key point— remember that the pilot is not walking around in the airport with a sign saying, "hi there: I'm one of the few pilots allowed to carry a gun in the cockpit." Even in my hypothetical case, he's unlikely to be made as carrying—and, if that's a concern, the pilot could always be required to carry in Thunderwear or some other impossible-in-practice-to-detect carry method.
In reality, the gun case goes into the pilot's flight case, which stays with him anyway, until he gets to the flight deck. The only time he's parted from it is when, say, he goes outside the flight deck to use the bathroom—and it's still in that locked case. Somebody unauthorized—say, the flight engineer—who gets at the gun case is still faced with the problem of opening it.
That non-problem solved—then let's remember that it's only Schneier's utter unfamiliarity with the basics of concealment and storage, like gunboxes, that makes it a problem in the first place—we go on to the next.
"Second, we need a procedure for storing the gun on the airplane."
Schneier multiplies nonexistent problems, and a mathematical wizard should know that zero times zero is still, well, zero. Remember, the purpose of the pilot carrying the gun is not to take it out into the main cabin to solve problems of unruly passengers, or even terrorists. (In fact, one of my students was one of the few pilots to go jump through all the hoops of the training program -- they spend a lot of time discussing that, even though it's obvious to anybody except a computer security expert.) The purpose is to prevent the hijacker from getting onto the flight deck to seize control of the airplane, when all other precautions and countermeasures have already failed. Worrying about the hijacker not only seizing control of the airplane so that he can ram it into, say, the Sears Tower but also getting a handgun brings us back to the place settings on the Titanic problem.
In practice, the pilot stores the gun in the gunbox, and only takes it out if he needs to. He doesn't go walking about the cabin with a gun "on his hip." The air marshals do, by the way—and while cops frequently have problems with guns being taken away from them, the problem is almost exclusively one of uniformed cops, or plainclothes police been making arrests—that's the time when perpetrators know that they've got a possible gun to grab.
"Third, we need a system of training pilots in gun handling and marksmanship."
Sure. But he makes it sound like that's a big deal, and that's his unfamiliarity with guns talking. There's nothing wrong with knowing nothing more about guns than what you see on Magnum PI—until, like Schneier, one starts making pronouncements about them. Some activities involving handguns are very difficult, and require great innate ability and/or much training; things like, say, long-distance bulleye shooting, or dynamic entry to perform a hostage rescue. Some activities require little more than basic familiarization and not-horribly-substandard eye-hand coordination. In this case, we're not talking about teaching snap-shooting to the braincase in a crowded cabin—we're talking about a situation where the hijackers are coming through the door, just a few feet away, and all that's necessary, in that situation is for the armed pilot to point the gun at the door the moment that it starts to open, and keep pulling the trigger until he hears clicks; then reloading and repeating. Sure, bullets could go past the hijackers -- and, at least some of the time, they likely will—and quite possibly injure or kill innocent passengers. That's unfortunate, but it's utterly irrelevant -- remember, absent the hijackers being stopped, all the passengers are dead, as are many hundreds, or perhaps thousands, on the ground.
In practice, all the pilot really needs to do in terms of gun handling under normal circumstances is to, just in the interests of gun safety, open the box when he first gets possession of it (say, before leaving his home), verify that it's loaded, and then close and lock the box. The only other time that he may need to open it is if he's got a concern that the door is about to be breached.
Schneier's next paragraphs are kind of a doozy. Are kind of doozies. Whatever.
"Giving pilots guns is a disaster waiting to happen."
If so, it's been waiting for a long time. It wasn't all that long ago that pilots could, routinely, carry guns in the cockpit, without any federal restrictions at all.
"The current system spends a lot of time and effort keeping weapons off airplanes and out of airports."
Well, no. Weapons are not kept out of airports—and I'm not quibbling about the distinction between "weapons" and "guns," although I could. Let's just talk about guns. Schneier doesn't know that it's perfectly legal, and utterly common, for permit holders to carry in airports—just as long as they don't try to take them through security. Unless I'm going through security, I always have my handgun with me. That's not particularly because of the terrorism problem; I just make it a point to carry, all of the time, wherever it's lawful and sensible.
Guns aren't kept off of planes, either. And I'm not just talking about the air marshals, either. Shipping guns on airplanes has always been commonplace—every time I go to another state where my carry permit's valid, my gun comes along with me, in the very same airplane in which I travel. (Granted, it flies in the baggage compartment—which is, by the way, while not easily accessible from the passenger compartment, not utterly inaccessible, either. We could, if we wanted to miss the point as much as Schneier does, worry about the possibility of a terrorist breaking into the cargo compartments to retrieve a handgun legally shipped by himself or a confederate, but let's not; a hijacker intending to use a gun to take over a plane will just smuggle it into the passenger compartment.)
If you're starting from an hysterical, superstitious, and, well, crazy position that guns are animate objects the mere presence of which sends out bad karmic vibrations, this is a horrible thing, and no wonder that Schneier tries not to think about it. If you're starting from the position that a gun is an inanimate tool, with certain physical characteristics, it's not a big deal.
But, of course, we can quickly see where Schneier is coming down:
"the proposed scheme would inject thousands of handguns into that system."
Ah, the problem of concretized metaphor. The problem isn't the presence or absence of a handgun, not even on a plane. Guns are tools -- and, like all tools, they're useful for some things, and utterly useless for others. As a primarily psychological weapon for persuading a cabinful of passengers not to attack an erstwhile hijacker, their utility ended, fairly early in the day, almost a year before Schneier wrote this piece; that's why we haven't seen hijackings in the US.
But as a tool for preventing a very small number of men from breaching a cockpit door and getting inside, they're likely to be awfully useful.
"There are just too many pilots and too many flights every day; mistakes will happen. Someone will do an inventory one night and find a gun missing, or ten. Someone will find one left in a cockpit. Someone may even find one on a seat in a terminal."
This comes under the heading of, "if so, so what"? A gun, or a gunbox, is found to be missing, somewhere. And? Cops, alas, lose or misplace guns all the time. As long as this doesn't happen in the security zone of the airport, it's not at all important. If the gun is lost inside the security zone, it's lost while it's inside the gunbox, presenting additional difficulties for the person who finds it to do anything bad with it. If you're going to insist on worrying about guns being lost inside the security zone, it's much more sensible to worry about one of the air marshals leaving his gun in an airport bathroom—their guns aren't kept in gun boxes.
But do remember that pilots' guns aren't special sorts of demons, different from—presumably worse than—the usual sorts of demons that Schneier thinks guns already are. Even if, say, a gun finds its way onto a plane in the possession of some unauthorized person, that can happen any time. The Feds are constantly doing tests of their own systems, and they find that more than half the time, their testers are able to smuggle guns into the security zone of the airport. Hell, with permission, and an afternoon in a friend's basement shop, I'd expect to be able to do much better than that. A terrorist who wants to smuggle a gun on the plane has many easier ways to do it than some preposterously complicated plot involving trying to figure out which pilots have gunboxes, and then managing to acquire the gun box without alarming everybody involved—before, remember, the plane ever takes off. (When the plane takes off, the gunbox, along with the gun and pilot, are on the flight deck behind those locked doors.)
"El Al is the most security-conscious airline in the world. Their pilots remain behind two bulletproof doors, and they're unarmed. It's the job of the pilot to land the plane safely, not to engage terrorists in close combat. For that, they rely on sky marshals, crew, and passengers. If pilots have to leave the cockpit to solve a security problem, it's too late."
Well, he's right in that the El ALpilots stay behind the bullet-*resistant* doors, and that their job is to fly the plane, not solve security problems. That's something that should be kept in mind by those involved in setting policy for US airlines' security. (Schneier is right, here and elsewhere, when he argues that the security of the cabin door is the key.)
But, unarmed? That's only a recent development, and only entered into after all of the other security measure were instituted, including the double doors. And that's only viable because, in addition to the armed marshals on the planes, El Al does the kind of screening of passengers that, as Schneier admits, US airlines can't do.
In more than three decades of always-armed pilots, El Al did not have a successful hijacking, nor, despite Schneier's cries of "disasters waiting to happen," did any of his vague disasters happen.
Meanwhile, despite hassles from an Administration that bought into the cries of doom and gloom, there now are armed pilots in cockpits all over the US.
I skipped over the worst part of this essay; I thought I'd been hard enough on a guy who is just, after all, over his head. (Although I've got to wonder: given that he's this bad on stuff I know something about, how trustworthy is he on things where he isn't so obviously over his head? He can't be this bad on computer security... or can he?)
Nah.
"The last thing we want is for an attacker to exploit one of these systems in order to get himself a gun. Or maybe the last thing we want is a shootout in a crowded airport."
Sheesh. Get your eye back on the ball, Bruce. The last thing we need is for another hijacker, or bunch of hijackers, to seize control of a jumbo jet and ram it into a building.
The trouble with experts in one field is that they often have trouble making the—pardon the expression—paradigm shift when looking at another field, even when looking at normal situations. Terrorists attempting to seize a plane to ram it into a building is anything but a normal situation, and it's just plain braindead to talk about what the pilot's normal "job" is, in that context. If that's what's about to happen, it's the job of everybody on the plane to prevent it, and the flight deck—and the pilots and flight engineer on that flight deck—are, necessarily, the very last line of defense. That line of defense hasn't been needed since September 11, 2001, when it failed horribly.
But if it is needed, we've got the choice of either the pilot having to stand in the door, hoping that a taser, or billy club (no pepper spray, please, Bruce!) or prayer will stop a well-trained, highly-motivated group of hijackers . . .
Or turning over control of the airplane to the other pilot, while he turns around and kneels on his seat, intending to put bullets—lots of them; this is no time to count on the "one shot stop"—into the likes of Mohammed Atta and his would-be shahid friends as they try to come through the door.
It takes a "security expert" or a particular kind of fool—or both, of course—to think the first choice is better.
Take a deep breath, Bruce; it'll be okay.
Postscript
Argh. I do miss stuff. A correspondent points out that Schneier's concerns, such as they are, apply far more to the air marshalls than to the pilots.Which, of course, is true. Air marshalls are, almost all of the time, undercover as passengers, although piercing the veil of their cover is obviously not an insuperable challenge. Either they're always in the rear seats, with their backs up against the bulkhead—a red flag as to who to look at, if you're any erstwhile terrorist—or they're in any of the other seats in the cabin, with potentially untrustworthy people (terrorists, say) sitting behind them. For obvious reasons—the lack of a locked door between them and the putative terrorists—their handguns can't be kept in a locked box, the box concealed in a briefcase, but are kept on their persons. If you're going to worry about a terrorist taking away and using a gun aboard the plane, you should worry a lot more about the air marshalls than about the armed pilots.
Should you be worried? Nah. While Schneier's objections apply much more to the marshalls than they do to the pilots, they're still off the mark....
...particularly when there's an armed pilot behind that bullet-resistant cockpit door.
Updated October 3, 2003—Free Advice for Trainers
I've been watching and talking to some other trainers, and have been, in some cases, very impressed with the level of training and professionalism; in some cases, less so. I'm a bit concerned about giving advice when it hasn't been asked for—and a bit moreso about criticizing others in public, providing ammunition for the antis—but, so be it.
I don't pride myself on offering the lowest class fee, and I don't; I do pride myself on doing the best job I can—that's a subjective thing, granted—and on being utterly clear on what the costs are.
I got a call the other day, from somebody who wanted to order the book. He wasn't happy. Turned out that he'd considered taking my class, but chose another instructor's course. Understandable, I guess; the other instructor was charging $130, rather than my $175 fee, and, after all, the other instructor had a good reputation, too.
Why not save forty-five bucks? he thought.
Doesn't sound crazy to me. But it didn't quite work out that way, although he said that the class was pretty good. The other instructor didn't include the book, and did both his classroom work and range qualification at Bill's Gun Range. Since the guy didn't have a suitable gun to shoot his qualification with, he had to rent one at Bill's. $65 for the facilities fee, $15 for the gun rental, and he still didn't have the book—another $30 for that, what with postage and handling. His "$130 course" ended up costing him $240, when all was said and done, rather than the $183 ($175 course fee; $8 range fee at Burnsville) it would have cost with me. (I loan a gun to students who need one, and pick up the charge for the classroom. And, of course, the book is included in my course.) Actually, it was a bit more than that—he had to buy ammo at Bill's, and it's more expensive there than at Burnsville.
I sure hope it was a good class.
I've been told that I probably mention the $8 range fee at Burnsville too much. I think that's a fair criticism, but there's two reasons that I do mention it often. For one, one trainer who does his shooting at Burnsville pays the $8 fee himself—but charges his students $20 for their shooting qualification. Obviously, I don't want any of that sort of image to rub off on me. Yuck. Secondly, I'd much rather bore people a bit with details than have somebody have to plunk down even $8 at the last minute without knowing about it in advance. Life's too short to build hassles over that sort of thing.
What we do is very different from training for cops, and we need to make that clear. Just to pick one example, all of the escalation of force issues that cops have to deal with, both in terms of law and practice, aren't our issues; we get to run away, instead of escalating force. Being civilians, we're required to be "reluctant participants." Cops aren't.
And, sure, that includes disagreeing with me.
August 24, 2003
It's been an interesting time. On May 4, 2003, I did the very first AACFI-certified carry course after the new law passed, and have done quite a few since, as well as developing the Beginner-to-Carry course with David Dyer-Bennet.There's been some definite trends—and some things have stayed the same, at least in my classes.
What's stayed the same is that, at least in my classes, the folks taking training are invariably very serious people, looking for information, not trouble. I had, of course, expected that to be the case overall, but I've yet to run into anybody whose attitude has concerned me.
Begin cheap shot
I guess that is, in part, because Rebecca Thoman, the nice woman who runs "Citizens for a Safer Minnesota," seems to have ignored my offer of a $25 discount for CSM members.
End cheap shot.
Cheap shots aside: Hey, Rebecca? The offer stands. I think it's in everybody's interest if you know what's actually being taught, rather than worrying about it. Still, I don't think that the Twin Cities Carry Course would be right for most of your members; I've talked to quite a few at the hearings before the MCPPA passed. While, obviously, I disagree with them on how the MCPPA would have caused fender-benders to turn into shootouts, leaping handguns, and blood flowing in the streets and such, by and large, they seemed to be a pleasant bunch of fairly normal middle-aged women, if more than a bit on the nervous side. Still, none of those I've talked to seem to have any experience—watching tv doesn't count—with firearms at all, but the offer applies to the Beginner-To-Carry course, as well. Take it easy, Rebecca; the sky isn't falling.
The initial rush, of course, is over, which is just as well; things were way too busy, at first. The folks who were eagerly waiting for the law to pass to get their carry permits have, over the past almost four months, gotten them.
And there's been a lot fewer hassles than many people, me among them, had expected. The sheriffs, by and large, have been playing by the rules, although there've been a few exceptions; Bruce Andersohn, the Anoka County Sheriff, added an extra-legal requirement for permit holders, and was recently slapped down in court, and has, so it appears, mended his ways. Optimists will probably think that he was just unclear on the actual plain meaning and wording of the law; realists will probably guess that it was having to pay the successful plaintiff's stiff legal fees that opened his eyes. Largely, the sheriffs' game playing has been chin music. The Ramsey Sheriff, Jim Fletcher, was demanding that applicants make an appointment at his deputies' convenience, but when applicants have just showed up during normal business hours without an appointment, they've been served without much hassle. One deputy got in a bit of a huff when several of my students pointed out to him that the they'd gone beyond the 30 days in which the sheriff could deny a permit—but, after a certain amount of whining and complaining, Fletcher's office simply issued the permits. Good choice; they wouldn't have wanted to fight that one in court.
Surprisingly, there's been very few hassles from Hennepin, despite the fact that Sheriff McGowan was a loud and vocal opponent of carry reform. I guess he's figured out either that he's supposed to obey the law, or that failing to obey it is going to be a real drain on his budget. Or both.
The most dramatic failure has been of the antis to promote much of any hysteria, although they do keep trying. Not always terribly consistently. Chris Farley, the "Minnesota Business Owner" who runs this website can't see to get her story straight. On the same page she writes:
Guns are allowed at the State Fairgrounds.and
Hanguns (sic)at the State Fair?C'mon, Chris: get a spellchecker, and do try to get it right. (Hint: you were right the first time. The State Fair can't ban permit holders from carrying their handguns, and permit holders are quite properly carrying there, as well as other public places. The only thing you have to fear from permit holders at your State Fair booth is a few snickers. Relax, Chris; the sky isn't falling.)
The State Fair has banned handguns...
All in all, it's going well. The antis are gearing up for their repeal push, which has some folks worried. I'm not. I think it's only fair that their attempts to repeal or modify the MCPPA get a full hearing, in both House and Senate, but it would, it seems to me, make sense to wait for that until either the MCPPA has been around for a couple of years, or there've been some real problems. Neither has happened, as of yet, and I don't expect there'll be any more problems with permit holders in Minnesota than there have been in any of the other thirty-odd states with "shall issue" handgun permit laws.
Yes, staying alert makes sense, but there's nothing to worry about. Realistically, the only chance that the antis have for repeal is for the left wing of the DFL to take over House, Senate, and the governorship, before enough time has passed for everybody to understand that they sky isn't falling. Governor Pawlenty isn't even up for reelection until 2006; the House is pretty clearly going to remain Republican this fall; and the only reason that the DFL has a chance to hold the Senate is the political survival of the outstate DFLers who voted for the MCPPA. The earliest possible time for the MCPPA to be seriously amended or repealed is 2006, by which time we'll have more than three years of history of no problems with permit holders, as well as the small-but-significant drop in violent crime that always accompanies "shall-issue" laws.
It'll be fine. The sky isn't falling.