Kopel: Gun Owners Winning Big In 2017

posted on April 26, 2017

In a Tuesday feature article at Thehill.com, longtime America’s 1st Freedom contributor Dave Kopel, research director for the Independence Institute, teamed up with Colorado attorney Joseph Greenlee to detail how gun owners are winning the battle in the states in 2017.

“So far this year, 13 state legislatures have enacted laws to strengthen the right to keep and bear arms, and none have passed new gun control laws,” Kopel and Greenlee wrote. “In every year this century, pro-gun laws have outnumbered anti-gun laws, but this year’s score is particularly lopsided.”

The duo pointed toward the Clinton-Obama strategy of marketing the Democratic Party as the party of gun control, devastating Democratic state legislative candidates in much of the country. “A long-term explanation is the trend that began in the 1980s towards liberalizing gun carrying laws,” they wrote further. “When doomsday predictions about right to carry do not come true, states that have liberalized their laws look at their own experience, and the experience of other states, and decide that further liberalization is in order.”

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