Stances Regarding Regulation

Our members opinions on things range all over, it’s a diverse group, and hard to present a consensus that reflects the entirety of the membership. That said, we did embark on an internal discussion to develop replacements for those positions and to have some answer to what we think is “reasonable regulation.”

Various state and local governments have proposed and enacted new rules and regulations. Some of them are potentially good, many of them are bad. Here is what the “elders” of Liberal Gun Club (basically long time contributors and annual meeting attendees) thinks about “reasonable” control, at least in so much as liberals can agree.

Like any good opinion, these may evolve over time as new data informs the debate and new voices enter the discussion.

These are starting places for that discussion.

We also have legislative ideas that we specifically support. You can read about them here.

On Regulation
We favor root cause mitigation for violence prevention, stronger mental health care, addressing poverty, homelessness and unemployment rather than focusing on prohibiting or restricting one tool.

This includes opposition to the so-called Assault Weapons Ban, as well as restrictions on magazine capacity and this view is directly related to our preference on an enforcement approach to regulation.

We favor enforcement of existing regulations over the creation of new regulatory schemes.
We believe that additional regulation is too often political window dressing and does not serve to resolve the ills for which it is claimed as a cure. This includes the so-called Assault Weapons Ban, as well as proposed restrictions on magazine capacity.
We favor increased, accurate reporting by states for NICS reliability.
States should be provided with incentives to increase accurate reporting. Additionally, certain federal programs can and should share information with one another on items such as mental health state, military discharges and possibly federal drug testing results. There also needs to be an appeal process for items inaccurately or inappropriately persisted into the records of individuals.
We are in favor of mandatory safety testing as a condition of licensing for CCW
Demonstrating proficiency is less expensive for the applicant than mandatory training, we believe this mitigates any arbitrary financial barriers to a permitting process. So long as permits are the law of the land, there should be some uniformity to them, allowing for a national reciprocity framework.
We favor minimum standards based national CCW reciprocity
In our opinion, this preserves states rights and doesn’t impose standardless permits on states that don’t want them.

Currently the LGC has instructors in these states

Arizona

California

Colorado

Connecticut

Florida

Illinois

Massachusetts

Maryland

Michigan

Minnesota

Missouri

Montana

Nebraska

Nevada

New Jersey

New York

North Carolina

Ohio

Oklahoma

Oregon

Texas

Utah

Virginia

Washington

Washington, DC

Wisconsin

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