Lawmakers in Indiana are considering whether their state’s application to own a gun license should include a question about whether the applicant has been convicted of misdemeanor driving under the influence.
Currently, the application used by Indiana State Police to grant licenses to carry a gun asks whether the applicant has previously been convicted of a DUI. Indiana Senate Bill 36, written by Sen. James Tomes, R-Wadesville, seeks to remove that question.
"All I was trying to do was just get the State Police to remove those words, ‘Including DUI? Not changing anything else," said Tomes. "State Police can still do these checks on handgun applications. Anybody in the system is gonna get pulled up. You’ve got domestic violence. You’ve got DUIs to the point where you’ve got a felony. You’re through."
Other who agreed with Tomes believed that misdemeanors should not be grounds for automatically refusing a permit, only felonies and domestic violence convictions.
Many of these who testified at a Judiciary Committee meeting on Wednesday, however, strongly disagreed with Tomes.
"Essentially what we’re saying is the combination of alcohol and access to handguns is a lethal combination in situations of domestic abuse," said Kathy Williams, a representative from The Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence. "And given the very mild nature of the existing statute, it is only a small stop gap.”
She also provided statistics from Indiana law enforcement agencies to show that up to 80 percent of their domestic violence cases involve alcohol abuse.
“Gun licenses are more than just pieces of paper," said Jody Madeira, a professor at Indiana University-Bloomington’s Maurer School of Law. "That paper conveys an important right. A right that a lot of people, including me in this room, want to uphold and protect the right to carry a handgun. But multiple studies as well as the Centers for Disease Control link alcohol abuse to gun violence.”
While I’m not the biggest fan of guns, it troubles me that legislators are using DUI convictions to prevent gun ownership.
Refer to my previous post: http://ltduiblog.wpengine.com/2015/11/23/not-all-drunk-drivers-are-alcoholics/
The flawed logic in Indiana’s inquiry into whether a person has suffered a DUI conviction is this: Many incidences of domestic violence involve alcohol abuse and if a person has suffered a DUI, they must have an alcohol problem. Therefore, they cannot and should not own a gun.
Once again we see the “False Cause Logical Fallacy;” A causes B when there is no causal relationship between the two, but merely a correlation.
A DUI conviction does not mean that the defendant has an alcohol problem. Nor does it mean that they will be involved in domestic violence. In fact, many people who have been convicted of a DUI are not regular drinkers nor are they heavy drinkers, but rather people who made a one-time mistake.
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