Why I Feel Safer Thanks to the Supreme Court Expanding Concealed-Carry Rights

Buck Sexton was trained in firearms by the CIA and was deployed to war zones. Yet the co-host of “The Clay Travis & Buck Sexton Show,” for which I work, had long been denied his right to carry in New York City.Empire State Democrats wail about the ruling in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, which vouchsafes the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. They prefer that permit applications face automatic rejection, never considering anyone who — Allman Brothers style — “wound up on the wrong end of a gun.”The New York Sun summed up its position in 2019 by saying the paper is “unwilling to support any new measures to tighten gun regulations anywhere in America until a carry permit is issued as a matter of right to Craig Whitney.”Mr. Whitney, a Vietnam veteran and author of “Living With Guns: A Liberal’s Case for the Second Amendment,” is a former editor and foreign correspondent of the New York Times. He’s also a grandfather who has never had so much as a speeding ticket. He’s as stable as a person can get. When he’s not editing, he’s a worldscale church organist.Yet, as described by the Sun, he “can’t get over the fact that he doesn’t need the government’s permission to exercise his First Amendment rights in journalism but would need a permit to exercise his rights that the Second Amendment prohibits infringing.”Buck Sexton pointed out that while the average law-abiding American hadn’t been able to get a concealed carry permit under New York’s Sullivan Law, which dates from 1911, there are some exceptions: Celebrities. “Famous, important people, powerful people — and they usually often had armed security on top of all that, too. Well, that’s not the way this is supposed to be,” he said.Yes, even lives without blue check marks matter. Although I don’t know if Buck Sexton will choose to carry, the bad guys won’t know, either. That ambiguity is a powerful deterrent.For two decades before “Clay and Buck,” I worked for Rush Limbaugh at a studio in Radio City Music Hall, where we had to rely on the Rockettes as our only line of defense.Rush Limbaugh had armed security, a former NYPD officer he nicknamed “Stalin,” but he knew that few Americans could afford that protection. It’s one of the reasons he referred to the staff by nicknames on air — mine was Koko Jr. — to protect our identities.It’s standard these days to claim you’re receiving death threats. Rush Limbaugh really got them. One man showed up at his TV show location with a sword concealed in a cane. Another sent a novel fantasizing about his murder. Suspicious packages arrived in the mail.Seeing Stalin at Rush Limbaugh’s side made foes walk small, but the rest of us remained potentially in the crosshairs of killers like James T. Hodgkinson, the former volunteer for Senator Sanders who gunned down Republican congressmen in 2017.People who lean toward liberalism, like Mr. Whitney, also feel unsafe, which is why even the anti-gun celebrity Rosie O’Donnell travels with armed guards, and why the liberal icon Eleanor Roosevelt holstered a .38.Up until Bruen, only connected people like them could get legal guns in places awash with illegal ones. Average citizens were at the mercy of thugs.Now, the Second Amendment again applies to everyone, from Buck Sexton and Mr. Whitney to celebrities who fear sharing John Lennon’s fate. Even the radio guy who no longer has to depend on a Rockette to kick the revolver out of a killer’s sweaty grip.

Why I Feel Safer Thanks to the Supreme Court Expanding Concealed-Carry Rights

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