The Flaw
I think there are more than a few things fundamentally wrong with this story:
Edwin F. Hale Sr. will keep his gun permit even after bringing a loaded .38-caliber revolver into BWI Marshall Airport last month.
Anthony McLean won’t get to keep his gun permit, because he was convicted of breaking and entering more than a quarter-century ago.
The two cases have different facts and raise different issues, but they provide a rare — if narrow — glimpse into the secretive gun permitting process in Maryland.
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The problem is not with Hale getting to keep his permit. It seems by even the Byzantine concealed carry permit laws in Maryland that Hale meets the standards to keep his permit.
It’s the fact that Ed Hale can have a permit to carry a gun and most average Marylanders cannot. And it isn’t a new phenomenon: just last year we chronicled the fact that Baltimore City Council President Jack Young packs heat. But Democratic leaders in Maryland refuse to budge on the idea that allowing concealed carry permits would make the streets dangerous when common sense and statistical evidence prove that idea to the contrary while they and opinion makers continue to hold to this juvenile idea that guns are bad.
Permits for people like Ed Hale and Jack Young prove one thing; in Maryland the right to effective personal protection and concealed carry permits are generally afforded to the politically connected. It makes little sense why Maryland remains stuck in the past, and why our citizens are not allowed the full and legal right of personal protection like that majority of Americans currently do.
