(February 27, 2001) By promoting a measure intended to shut down legal gun shows, Montgomery County Council may soon expand the 'gun free zones' first created in 1997. Bill 2-01 was heard by the council's safety subcommittee in Rockville, a much reported event due to the raucous audience present. Your messages for the council may still be left on a 24-hour comment line, at 240 777-7999. Frankly, we don't think anything citizens say about this attack on rights will affect what the council does, but that shouldn't stop readers from filling up their in-box in protest. Have at it.

This is the same body that ignored hundreds of citizens who showed up in opposition to 1997's gun control bills. It's a council that bowed to demands of paid control-mongers who didn't even live in the state. After instituting the county's first gun-free zones, the county never bothered to write regulations for their law. Now this council says their first law must be toughened, even though there was no legal way to have used it in the last four years.

It isn't like any of this is unexpected. In fact it's a classic attack. Once a gun law is put on the books, it's a simple matter later to fiddle with definitions in order to incrementally expand the law's scope. This time the target is one of Maryland's last remaining gun show operators, Frank Krasner of Silverado Gun Shows, who's run upstanding and lawful events in the county for over a decade. The effort is spurred by fear-inspiring propaganda published in the Gazette Newspaper, for which reporting the lack of any link between gun shows and crime seems too much.

Sadly, these affairs do not reflect advocacy's finest hour for gunowners. The Gazette's original push to ban gun shows focused last fall on the Fairgrounds, which is a private operation. Nobody at that organization had a beef with Silverado, so after a few weeks of community feedback (much of it generated from readers here) advocates convinced cooler heads in the county that gun control just wasn't an issue they needed fight locally; it should be moved to the state legislators to consider. This gave county personnel a face saving way to drop their hot potato, and was agreeable to gun owners who could contest the issue on a battleground where we have bigger guns.

Unfortunately, extremist groups that value protest over substance continued to generate negative publicity over the gun show issue by holding demonstrations that the press could portray as linked to gun groups. This killed hope of victory, since once a handful of agitators forced the county to posture, the matter's graceful redirection became an impossibility. Nobody here will argue against anyone's right to free speech, but the bottom line is that gunowners were sucked into a battle we needn't have fought (and can't win on this county battlefield.)