“Georgia lawmakers are now considering passing the most extreme gun bill in America.” -- Pia Carusone, executive director of Americans for Responsible Solutions, in a press release on Feb. 26
The Georgia House passed and sent to the state Senate last month a sweeping bill that would lift restrictions on guns in houses of worship, bars, airports and college campuses, and it would allow schools to beef up security by arming front office staff, teachers and other employees.
Passions are running high for and against House Bill 875, which supporters have named the Safe Carry Protection Act and critics call the “guns everywhere bill.”
Among those lobbying to kill the bill is Americans for Responsible Solutions, a national group that former U.S. Rep. Gabby Giffords, D-Ariz., and her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, founded after her near-fatal shooting in January 2011.
In a press release and Internet video released Feb. 26, Giffords’ group urged Georgians to appeal to the state Senate and Gov. Nathan Deal to defeat the bill. “Georgia lawmakers are now considering passing the most extreme gun bill in America,” Pia Carusone, the group’s executive director, said in the release.
Knowing the many and varied gun measures that exist or are proposed across the nation, could Georgia really be looking at “the most extreme gun bill in America?”
We decided to run the statement through the Truth-O-Meter.
We began by asking Giffords’ group to explain the claim. Carusone said the group is tracking 200 gun bills in legislatures across the country, many of which “weaken common-sense gun violence prevention policies.” But none of the bills has “as many extreme provisions as we see in this one Georgia bill,” she said.
“Not only does the bill invite guns into virtually every public space, reversing 100-year-old regulations, it allows teachers to carry guns while teaching class and airplane passengers to attempt to bring guns through (Transportation Security Administration) security without consequence,” Carusone said. “It also would allow guns to be in courthouses. State legislation typically focuses on one of these issues, not all of them.”
Experts we checked with said there’s no evidence that, if the bill passes, Georgia would be considered to have the most lax gun laws. Alaska, Arizona, Vermont and Wyoming don’t even require a permit to carry a concealed weapon.
The bill’s chief sponsor, Rep. Rick Jasperse, R-Jasper, said labeling his bill as the nation’s “most extreme” is a typical tactic of groups that survive on fundraising and headline-grabbing.
He said the provision dealing with airports is meant to help the licensed gun owner who forgets she has her gun in her purse until she’s going through TSA screening. With proof that she has a license, she’ll be turned away but not arrested, Jasperse said. Unlicensed gun carriers will still face arrest and a misdemeanor charge, he said.
Experts we contacted tended to agree that proving any measure to be the most extreme would be difficult.
Carusone’s statement is “a pretty hard one to test because to do so one would need to know all the laws on all these different issues in every single state,” said David Mustard, an associate professor of economics at the University of Georgia’s Terry College of business.
We did a cursory review of bills pending in five other states, including Idaho’s campus-carry bill, and didn’t see any that appeared to go far beyond the weapons-carrying laws in many of the other 49 states.
One provision of HB 875 would lower the age for active-duty military in Georgia to carry a concealed weapon from 21 to 18. But the majority of Georgians would still fall under the age 21 requirement, and some states, including New Hampshire and Iowa, allow residents to obtain a concealed weapons permit at 18 or younger, said Eugene Vokokh, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles.
And the provision to allow places of worship and bars to decide whether to allow licensed gun owners to bring guns into their establishments is moving to the “national norm,” said David Kopel, the research director at the Independence Institute in Denver.
“Part of what has motivated this initiative in churches is that there have been some very interesting and important cases where someone with a carry license has disarmed (a person) who entered a house of worship or organization with a distinctly Christian purpose with the intent to kill many people and commit a mass public shooting,” Mustard said. “To my knowledge, there are no examples of congregants using the guns in inappropriate ways in church.”
State Rep. Alan Powell, R-Hartwell, one of the bill’s co-sponsors, said none of the provisions in HB 875 “are not already law in some other states.”
Brian Malte, the senior national policy director for the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said Georgia’s bill is “extreme in its scope of allowing loaded, hidden guns in sensitive areas.”
But he said Arizona’s law also fits into the extreme category.
“No permit is required (in Arizona) to carry a loaded, hidden gun in public,” Malte said. “Not even a background check is required.”
So where does this leave us? Georgia’s bill clearly would include a large number of changes, which is a flag-raiser to gun safety advocates.
But there are pitfalls to calling anything the worst, the first or, in this case, the “most extreme.” The biggest being: “Can you prove it?” All we really have is Carusone’s statement that her group is following 200 bills across the country and hasn’t seen any that have as “many extreme provisions” as Georgia’s. Supporting evidence is lacking.
We rate the statement Mostly False.
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