Stances Regarding Regulation
Our members opinions on things range from pure authoritarian to pure libertarian, 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 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.
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.
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.
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
Are you a current firearms instructor that would like to offer LGC courses? Want to take one of our courses? Check out our frequently asked questions here first.