Georgia proposes sweeping law

Herbert Buchsbaum has an article in The New York Times about gub laws in Georgia:

Pro-gun and anti-gun forces do not agree on much, but they do agree on the breathtaking sweep of the Georgia legislation allowing guns in bars, schools, restaurants, churches, and airports that is now awaiting the signature of Governor Nathan Deal.
Americans for Responsible Solutions, founded by Gabrielle Giffords, the former Arizona congresswoman who was critically wounded in a mass shooting in 2011, calls it “the most extreme gun bill in America” and the “guns everywhere” legislation. The National Rifle Association, which lobbied for the bill, calls it “the most comprehensive pro-gun” bill in recent state history, and described the vote at the Capitol as “a historic victory for the Second Amendment.”
More than a year after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut elicited a burst of gun-control legislation, the Georgia bill shows just how far the counter-reaction has spread as lawmakers, mainly in Republican-controlled states in the South and West, pass laws allowing weapons in all corners of society while strengthening so-called Stand Your Ground laws. Critics say the victories may come at a price as pro-gun legislation pushes up against the limits of public opinion.
“I do think they’ve overreached,” said Laura Cutilletta, senior staff attorney at the San Francisco, California-based Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. The Georgia bill, she said, is “so extreme and people do have such a strong reaction to it. I don’t think over all it’s a victory for them”. The bill was opposed not only by gun-control groups, but also by the state’s police chiefs association and restaurant association, Episcopal and Catholic churches, and the federal Transportation Security Administration. A majority of Georgians also opposed it, according to several polls.
Deal, a Republican, who is expected to sign the bill, is up for re-election this year, but there is no sign of a political backlash against him or anyone who voted for the legislation. The governor’s Democratic opponent, State Senator Jason Carter, President Jimmy Carter’s grandson, also voted for the bill.
“I don’t think it will backfire,” said Jerry Henry, director of Georgia Carry, one of the main local groups that promoted the bill. “You can bet those politicians who voted for it knew what their constituents wanted.” What they wanted, in this case, would be a veritable gun-lobby shopping list. The bill allows people with a weapons permit to carry loaded guns into bars, as long as they do not consume alcohol, although the bill does not say how that caveat would be enforced. It allows guns in public areas of airports and eliminates criminal charges for permit holders caught with guns at airport security. It authorizes school districts to appoint staff members to carry guns at schools, ostensibly to defend students in case of an attack. It allows felons to claim the Stand Your Ground defense, in which someone who “reasonably believes” his life is in danger has no duty to walk away and may instead shoot to kill. And that is just the beginning.
Georgia lawmakers backed off a provision allowing guns on college campuses, and weakened the section allowing guns in churches, permitting them only if a church expressly decides to do so. An Atlanta Journal-Constitution poll in January of 2014 found that more than seventy percent of voters opposed both measures. The poll did not ask about guns in bars, but polls in other states have found seventy percent or more of the public opposed the idea.
Many bar owners said they were taken by surprise. “I don’t have any problems with people owning guns, but I do have a problem with guns and alcohol,” said Melissa Swanson, owner of the Rail Pub in downtown Savannah. “Everybody could be in here having a good time, but all you need is one bad drunk with a gun and it could be a bad situation.”
Backers of the bill say the aim is not to flood bars with guns. “This is a private property issue,” said State Representative Rick Jasperse, the bill’s original sponsor. “We’re not going to decide what goes on inside a bar. Let the bar owner decide.”
While the Georgia legislation is notable for its breadth, many of its provisions have been promoted by the National Rifle Association for several years and have cropped up separately in other states. In the past year alone, twenty-one states have passed laws expanding the rights of gun owners, according to the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Three allow guns in churches, two allow them on college campuses, four in bars, and eight in schools.
Some states have become so eager to be seen as gun-friendly that there are few limits on matters deemed worthy of legislative attention. The so-called Pop-Tart Bill, which the Florida House passed last week and is under consideration in Oklahoma, would shield schoolchildren from being punished for making a gun out of a breakfast pastry. The Second Amendment threat the bill seeks to remedy was that of a Maryland second grader who was sent home from school last year after biting a Pop-Tart into the shape of a gun.
If the new frontiers prove unpopular, the gun lobby may be a victim of its success. Every state now allows people to carry guns in some public places, 42 allow assault rifles, and no major federal gun control laws have been passed since 1994. So gun-rights groups have focused on carving out niches to expand where one can legally carry a gun.
There was a flurry of gun-control legislation after twenty-six children and educators were shot to death in Newtown, Connecticut by a well-armed, mentally disturbed twenty-year-old. But in the twelve months immediately afterward, states passed thirty-nine laws to tighten gun restrictions and seventy to loosen them.
The day the Georgia bill was passed, a fight broke out in a gray, windowless shack called Milo’s Bar in Marietta, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb. As the brawl spilled into the parking lot, at least three guns were drawn. Shots were fired, and a bystander was wounded.
It is not clear whether the new law would have changed anything. Milo’s already had No Weapons signs posted. Anyone there with a gun was already violating existing law as well as the bar’s policy. “The people you have to worry about are not the ones who have gone to the trouble to have applied for a license and gotten a background check,” said Henry of Georgia Carry. “The ones you have to worry about are the criminals, who are not going to abide by the law anyway.”
Gun control advocates counter that even people authorized to carry weapons can lose their temper, with potentially deadly results. Two recent cases in Florida appear to bear out that point: in one case, a man was shot dead in an argument over texting in a movie theater, and, in another, a teenager was killed in a dispute over loud music.
The issue is a simple one for Barbara Lawson. The 53-year-old Sandy Springs resident went to Milo’s to tape posters with her son’s picture on the bar’s exterior, demanding it be closed. Her son, Tekilum Terrell, 34, was killed there in April of 2013. “My son was killed in a bar with a nine-millimeter gun,” she said. “Without that gun, we’d still have him here. Do we need more guns in bars? After this? Seriously?”

Rico says the solution is simple: every bar patron gets handed a bulletproof vest and a handgun when they come in. (Just kidding. But a shotgub would work...)