After all, they elected this guy.
It’s going to be fun times in Iowa. Maybe they’re going to remove the requirements that you be licensed to drive, or practice dentistry, in the near future, and it’ll become a libertarian hell-hole where anything goes. At least, that’s the way it seems to be going, now that they’ve stripped out any licensing requirements at all to carry a handgun.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) on Friday signed a bill that allows people to purchase and carry handguns in the state without a permit.
“Today I signed legislation that protects the 2nd Amendment rights of Iowa’s law-abiding citizens while still preventing the sale of firearms to criminals and other dangerous individuals,” Reynolds wrote in a statement.
“We will never be able to outlaw or prevent every single bad actor from getting a gun, but what we can do is ensure law-abiding citizens have full access to their constitutional rights while keeping Iowans safe,” she added.
You won’t need a permit or any safety training at all to carry a gun into any public spaces! It’s an NRA wet dream! She defends it as a 2nd amendment issue; why do the gun nuts always forget the “well regulated militia” part of the Constitution?
I’m feeling trapped. I’ve got the assholes of Iowa to the south of me, and the ignorant yahoos of the Dakotas to the west of me, and Senator Ron Johnson guarding the borders of Wisconsin to my east. I’ve still got Canada as a bulwark of relative sanity to the north, but I know one thing for sure: I won’t be visiting Iowa until they throw out their Republican governor and restore some competence to their government.
2nd amendment
The rest of the UN considers this as total madness.
It may be a bit late in your career path but have you considered the University of Winnipeg or the University of Manitoba?
We have fairly sensible gun legislation and decent health care — hint “co-pay” is not a word here.
If the people who want to carry a handgun everywhere without a licence were not hypocrites they would also insist on being treated by a doctor without a licence. But come to think of it, some licenced practices are a joke: chiropractors in every state and naturopaths in 22 states. I suppose some people get what they deserve.
Reynolds wrote in a statement.
I wonder how that works, without licenses to verify them
Was that a slam at Ronald Reagan? Has the GOP moved so far to the right that they are throwing him under the bus in his home state?
I wonder how that works, without licenses to verify them
Oh, they’ll use the obvious tells: complection, accent, ethnicity, personal knowledge, etc.
Now you know how Frodo felt trying to get The Ring to Mount Doom except you don’t get to be the hero who saves the day.
The thing about the Second Amendment is that it’s never been considered to be a totally unfettered right. That’s why you still can’t by dynamite without a permit. There’s no reason why there can’t be a right to own a firearm with precautionary regulations like permits, waiting periods, and a ban on assault weapons.
@4
Reagan was born and grew up in Illinois, not Iowa.
I had made my mind up some time ago not to return to Iowa. This is another excellent reason not to. Don’t want anything to do with these people. More are horrid than not.
Well, I guess some state needed to corner the coveted suicide tourism market.
No permits, everyone has a gun, NRA dream. LOTS of “good guys with a gun”, so low crime, right? hahaha
So NRA, quick question for you: When Mr. Floyd was killed by the cop, would you have supported any of your members pulling a gun on the COP and saying “Stop killing him or I’ll shoot!”. To any gun-toters who were there watching the cop kill the man, did his uniform offer some special circumstances that allows blatant murder?
I thought the whole REASON you want to carry guns is to prevent this sort of thing…so use ’em. Next time you see a cop doing something illegal, pull your gun as a warning and make them stop. It’s the NRA dream…
…except when a cop’s involved. We both know their REAL reaction if you tried what I suggest.
The Constitution doesn’t mention guns. It mentions “arms”, and indicates that they are to be used for a well-regulated militia.
So that militia should be regulating the weapons of war that it uses. We don’t want loose cannons flying fighter jets or driving tanks in their off time.
The 2nd amendment isn’t about hunting. It isn’t about protecting one’s household from burglars. It’s not about collecting macho toys.
Iowa: No ID to buy or carry a gun; mandatory ID to vote. It’s plain which one the ruling class considers to be more dangerous.
@8 – Thanks. I guess I must have been thinking of his radio job at WHO.
My issue with the Second Amendment crowd is not that they think gun owners have rights — a point I actually agree with — but their insistence that only gun owners have rights.
No right is absolute, because you end up bumping up against other people’s rights. Free speech does not include the right to shout under someone’s bedroom window through a bull horn at midnight. Freedom of the press does not include the right to publish child pornography. Religious freedom does not include the right to hijack an airplane and fly it into the World Trade Center. Why? Because other people have rights too.
This is worth watching if you haven’t seen it. From Trevor Noah’s show.
Kim Reynolds who was serving out the remainder of Terry Branstad’s term was elected in 2018 with 667,275 votes.
Fred Hubbell, a liberal Democrat, received 630,986 votes.
But according to this post and most of the comments, ALL 3,155,070 Iowans are assholes.
This is not eliminationist thinking, but you’re getting closer.
Gun deaths per 100k. USA 12, UK 0.23. Nuff said.
The 2024 Iowa party caucuses (not “cauci” – the word apparently derives from Algonquian) should proceed less boringly than heretofore.
@19
In Iowa the Democrats hold caucuses while the Republicans hold a straw poll. So the caucuses will still be boring, if there are still caucuses held in 2024. There’s currently serious discussion in the Democratic Party about doing away with Iowa and New Hampshire going first in the Presidential nomination process and replacing them with say Nevada and South Carolina.
If you want to know the libertarian future, try Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”…
naturalistguy @20: Which begs the question over why any state needs to go first in the primaries.
We have essentially the same laws here in Missouri.
I was sitting in a crowded Missouri restaurant a few years back, having some lunch, when BANG there’s a gunshot. Some jackass was carrying a gun in the pocket of his windbreaker; when he sat down, it fell out and went off. The bullet went through a wall into the kitchen. Miraculously, no one was hit.
The cops were called, of course. They came, took the guy’s statement, and left. No arrest, no citation, they didn’t even seize the stupid fuck’s gun. They couldn’t legally do any of those things under Missouri law, although I doubt that would have stopped them if he hadn’t been an older white guy.
If the man had accidentally driven his car through the wall of the restaurant, he’d have at least gotten a ticket. But because he was careless with an instrument specifically designed to kill, he got nothing worse than a mild talking-to.
I was sorely tempted to introduce the man to the concept of “consequences” by introducing his head repeatedly to his table, especially given that his gun went off about three feet from my head (the restaurant is set up with tiered seating; he was on the upper tier, right on the other side of an opaque (but not bulletproof) barrier from me). If nothing else, it would have been an object lesson in the futility of carrying a gun for “self-defense.”
On hearing this my 13yo said: I hope they released the age restrictions too.
Actually that was the second thing she said, the first was: That’s stupid. Of course, being Australian she can’t possibly understand American FREEDOM!!!! 1!!1!!
/s
@naturalistguy in 7
This. So this.
This page (which is imperfect not least because it lists Puerto Rico as a separate country) has the USA listed with a higher murder rate than any European country save Russia & Ukraine – and they are at war, just to remind you.
Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are the two regions that obviously have more murders than anywhere else, which makes South Africa no surprise for the country with the highest murder rate that also has high-tech urban centers. Brazil would be 2nd on that list. But both of those countries still have huge numbers of people living in populations where the rule of law can’t be administered reliably or effectively. The same is frankly true of Russia, with its northwestern and far eastern extremes. Ukraine is compact enough and wealthy enough to have good communication and travel throughout the country for law enforcement, but that good communication & travel are interrupted by the war in and around Donbas province.
Out of all the countries that aren’t facing currently insurmountable logistical obstacles to bringing rule of law to its population, the USA ranks dead last in murder rates. On this list of countries that has the stability and infrastructure to reduce murder, we are the only one that has failed to do so to the astonishing extent that we have. Kazakhstan is doing better than the USA (5.0 murders per 100k population per year as compared to to the USA’s 5.5/100k – the US has a 10% increase compared to Kazakhstan’s rate) and they do have those logistical problems in their largely rural, sparsely populated nation.
Literally the closest to us might be Lithuania, but I don’t know enough about their levels of infrastructure and political stability to be sure. They have 4.5/100k per year – 18% better than the USA. Turkey is in the same ballpark for murder rate (4.3/100k) but their eastern regions are highly unstable and they are also a hotbed of drug traffic, for reasons very similar to the high rate of drug traffic in Mexico: they are both poorer countries with at least one porous border, and they both border wealthier neighbors (or, in Turkey’s case, that country provides entré to the European Union, which means getting the drugs into and then through Turkey essentially guarantees the drugs can reach anywhere from Hungary to Norway to Ireland to Spain).
Discounting Hungary and Albania for reasons of sheer smug self-importance, the country with the highest murder rate of any country in the world to which we would like to compare ourselves is Canada. Their murder rate is 1.8/100k – about 35% of the rate in the US.
Although the “gun deaths” statistic is useful, I find the murder rate even more compelling. We have the wealth, political stability, and infrastructure to make murder as rare as anywhere in the world, but of every country we would like to believe is a peer, the murder rates range from 0.2 (Japan) to 1.8 (Canada) per 100k of population.
At the very least, two thirds of the people who are murdered should be alive and would be alive if the US government was functioning for the general welfare and common defense.
Fuck the NRA, and fuck the politicians who refuse to try to fix this.
Steve King… Jeez, and they say the Democrats are pedophile cannibals.
That is the creepy smile of someone with the freezer full of body parts. Maybe you should check if he hung out with Epstein.
Real story this AM, “After school shootings NRA’s Wayne LaPierre sought refuge from mass shootings on a friend’s luxury yacht ” because he’s afraid of being shot. Part of the NRA bankruptcy corruption story.
@ 26 Crip Dyke
which is imperfect not least because it lists Puerto Rico as a separate country
I was under the impression that most continental USA citizens also thought that way. :)
Canada. Their murder rate is 1.8/100k
And way too bloody high. We have some serious social problems.
I do not know of any friend or relation who has been a victim of violence or encountered anything worse than a schoolyard fight in Canada.
OTOH, in the USA, an old family friend was shot and badly injured in a party store hold-up and a cousin’s husband spent hours keeping an attempted murder victim alive as he and his hunting buddies raced her to a hospital in northern Michigan.
While Saudi Arabia can be horrible I felt safer there than in the USA—Saudi drivers excepted.
CD @26:
I wonder how much smaller that might be if it weren’t so easy to smuggle guns in from the US.
Well, however they may be getting there, you certainly have an issue with guns coming from the US.
The video seems to show all of them have been headed to Flin Flon for some odd reason, but maybe this is just another one of your weird Canadian traditions that we never really hear about down here.
Can’t see the video for some reason, but Americans talking about weird Canadian traditions is hilarious.
Weird is not bad … not unless it’s the bad kind of weird of course.
Anyway, to be clear, it’s a 1950-2017 data visualization (by Will Geary) of the US and Russia selling military arms/equipment around the world (including Canada) … not actually handguns and the like. But that is part of the same story.
What next? Get outrage meter moved to max- Covid Kim and her Republicans are trying to change the state constitution to deny all forms of abortion. At least all us liberals in Iowa should be able to get a handgun to carry around. sigh