'Huge sea change' swings nation to packing heat

"Thirty years after a powerful gun-control movement swept the U.S., Americans are embracing the idea of owning and carrying firearms with a zeal rarely seen since the days of muskets and militias," reports Patrik Jonsson of the Christian Science Monitor. "A combination of favorable court rulings, grass-roots activism, traditional fears of crime, and modern anxieties about government has led to what may be a tipping point on an issue that just a few years ago was one of the nation's most contentious." (Monitor photo by Ann Hermes)

Jonsson says laws allowing citizens to carry concealed deadly weapons have become so widespread that the basic question is not "Should we be able to carry guns?" but "Where can't we carry them?" The answer, he writes, is "not very many places. Hundreds of gun-friendly laws have been enacted by states and localities in the past few years alone. Mississippi, for instance, now allows gun owners who take an extra safety class to carry hidden weapons on college campuses and in courthouses. . . . The number of concealed-weapon license holders in the U.S. has gone from a few hundred thousand 10 years ago to more than 6 million today. In some parts of Tennessee, 1 out of every 11 people on the street is either carrying a weapon or has a license to do so."

"It's a huge sea change, and one lesson to take out of all of this is that it's amazing how fast attitudes on constitutional issues can change," says Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and proprietor of the conservative but iconoclastic Instapundit.com blog. "The thinking has turned in a way that many thought to be impossible only 15 years ago." (Read more)