A Facebook comment I made summarizing my earlier post on an E.J. Montini article‘s complete lack of statistics on safety in Arizona due to fairly unrestrictive gun laws drew a comment that deserves mention here.

The comment, questioning the accuracy of my claim that Arizona’s law allowing Registered Conceal Carry of guns was passed in 1994, is brief but deceptive in it’s importance.

Rich Moss ‎@ jack we just passed the Conceal Carry Law so your data does not show any changes made by the law yet…. if we passed it in 1994, then it would show proof.

Simple enough:  Rich confused the recent unrestricted Concealed Carry law with the much earlier law allowing concealed carry with permit (CCW).  He was mistaken (and yes, I’m the jerk who points this out).  I was correct, and his comment turned out to support my claim that violent crime began to decrease immediately after passage of the registered conceal carry law.

Bully for me.

There’s much more importance to this.

Rich, who is politically aware enough to specifically question another comment’s accuracy on the Facebook page of a veteran Arizona Republic columnist, has been unaware that his fellow Arizona citizens have been legally carrying concealed guns since 1994.

Wait!  The anti-firearm crowd would have us believe that Arizona is the Wild West (if the wild west were actually wild, lawless, and full of frequent shoot-outs) due to our gun laws.

But here’s a seemingly rational, informed guy who had no idea that his neighbors were packing heat for the last 18 years.  He likely hasn’t been shot as a result, or shown the business side of a gun.  Easy access to guns by his law abiding neighbors changed his life so little that he never noticed them carrying guns.

In this sense, EJ Montini is right.  Arizona gun owners are indeed responsible.