I've seen Obama waffling on the Concealed Carry Permit issue for awhile. When travelling the rural areas, he and his wife finally got a wakeup call how important guns are culturally speaking and even defence-wise speaking. In the cities, handguns have a different experience. Yet, he hasn't officially changed his mind.

If I ever had the chance to ask Obama anything, it would be on this issue. I think he's dead wrong on it. It obviously comes from the urban gun crime problems. But, even as an urban crime initiative, a ban on concealed carry laws is, IMO, based on flawed logic insofar as a remedy.

For example, I wonder what he'd say, being biracial, about the following:

1) Would James Meredith, the civil rights marcher, been better off with a concealed handgun when bigots went to shoot him down on his lone marches?

2) Would James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, been better off with concealed handguns when Klansmen decided to seize them in their vehicle and then shoot them all?

3) How about all sorts of other blacks who were regularly terrorised by Klansmen and other bigots, including the lynchers?

etc. etc, etc.

Blacks were regularly deprived of firearms both before and after the Civil War. White slaveowners and white supremacists knew that disarming blacks allowed them to get away with slavery, Jim Crow, etc.

The US and Ireland did not get their freedom due to the eloquent words their heroes spoke. Many of those words were spoken on the gallows because their oppressors and enemies cared not for their words but the power they used to subjugate them. They got their freedom from guns. Tyrants like Hitler and others wanted guns over those they wished to subjugate and exterminate. It was guns that have defeated them.

Whether on an international, national or local level, the same patterns run true--all oppressors and ill-doers want any and all advantage over their prey in order to succeed.

Tyrants take the guns away from the people in order to subjugate them. Criminals and ill-wishers seek guns and wish their prey do not have them.

No criminal is going to care about a ban on concealed carry. They are criminals and carry them anyway. They hope, however, that those they prey upon no longer have them.

Guns are only as good or bad as the hands that hold them. Taking them away from the good only leaves them in the hands of the bad, all the more harmful to the good.