Ready, Aim?
Iowa is granting permits to acquire or carry guns in public to people who are legally or completely blind. Really? I mean I can see letting them have driver’s license (but only if they have a seeing eye dog) but this may be going too far. Just saying.
When I went to medical school in Des Moines, I befriended a legally blind family, and was a “big sister” to their daughter when she was 12. Because her parents were legally blind, she was allowed to drive by herself and them when she was only 13.
“I tied them to my fender and I drove them home somehow:
Two game wardens,
Seven hunters,
And a cow…”
– Tom Lehrer
Actually, I have no problem with this.
Show me an example of a blind person shooting somebody inappropriately (okay, even appropriately), and I’ll start to think about it.
I listened to the NPR interview with a vision impaired sheriff (30 years of sheriffing) who got a license for his vision impaired daughter. I was driving and almost had to pull over because I was totally distracted by the idea of the two of them on a firing range. Sounds like a great skit for Saturday Night Live.
I used to work for Fish & Game in another state before I went to medical school. Sportsmen with disabilities, including blindness, got special permits. Like with disabled parking permits, it requires a doctor to fill out and sign the application. Now that I’m doing those forms, there are no questions about whether a visually-impaired sportsman can hit a target with rifle, shotgun, archery or black powder equipment. The state is required to make accommodations because of the Americans with Disabilities Act. To my knowledge, none of these hunters has shot a human or livestock, and some of them have filled their tags. They don’t talk about it because it’s against the law for someone else to shoot your game for you.
Why not? We let illegals and welfare dependents vote, tasks for which they are spectacularly ill-suited, and mob policy kills far more people than handguns. Eh, what the hell…