By Charles C. W. Cooke
Friday, June 05, 2015
Carol Bowne is dead — murdered in cold blood on her own
property by a violent criminal who would not be restrained by good intentions.
But there is no smoking gun, because she lived and died in New Jersey.
Bowne was a 39-year-old hairdresser from Berlin Township
who had become increasingly nervous about her ex-boyfriend. Convinced that he
intended to do her physical harm, she took out a restraining order, had
security cameras installed at her home, and purchased an alarm system. She also
hoped to buy a firearm for her defense. On April 21 of this year, she began the
glacial process of obtaining a New Jersey permit to purchase a gun.
She never heard back. She never will. Per the
Courier-Post, Bowne “was stabbed to death in the driveway of her Patton Avenue
home on Wednesday night.”
Defending his tardiness, the local police chief explained
that the application process usually takes more than two months, and that when
Bowne died, his team was still waiting for her fingerprints to be processed.
Perhaps so. But this should serve as no acceptable excuse. By state law, New
Jersey is required to get back to permit petitioners within 30 days. It didn’t.
It almost never does. Instead, would-be gun owners report
waiting for three, four, six, and even nine months for permission to exercise
what the Second Amendment makes clear is an unalienable individual right. The
rules do not apply to the government.
For the citizenry, by contrast, minor infractions are
routinely transmuted into life-destroying sentences. Had there been no public
outcries, New Jersey would at present be hosting in its prisons a black single
mother of two who misunderstood the concealed-carry rules in Atlantic County; a
septuagenarian retiree who bought a non-functional, 260-year-old pistol from an
antiques dealer and was arrested for carrying without a license; and a security
guard and aspiring police officer who inadvertently left his firearm in his
glove box while driving with his girlfriend. For those who wish to enjoy their
right to keep and bear arms, the Garden State represents a significant blot on
the American escutcheon.
That diminutive women such as Carol Bowne are regarded as
collateral damage should not be surprising at all. That the free people of New
Jersey tolerate their lot with such alacrity, however, should be. Since the
passage of the Brady Bill in 1993, federal law has required that any purchaser
involved in a commercial firearms transaction must subject himself to a
background check. Contrary to the cynical insinuations of President Obama and
his friends at Everytown for Gun Safety, there is in fact no jurisdiction in
the United States in which a buyer can obtain a gun from a licensed dealer
without being screened. Indeed, in the vast majority of states, obtaining a
firearm is both a safe and a straightforward process: One goes into a store,
one presents one or more forms of government-issued ID, one submits to an
instant background check, and one walks out with a gun. The buyer gets what he
wants; the government gets its peace of mind. The whole process takes no more
than half an hour.
Alas, in order to discourage the citizenry from buying
firearms, eleven states have added another — wholly redundant — layer to the
sequence, demanding by law that would-be purchasers acquire a permit prior to
entering the store. In those jurisdictions it is necessary for buyers to pay a
fee and to submit a host of personal information before they receive the
government’s seal of approval. Alarmingly, that seal can take up to eight
months to be delivered. Thus do many at-risk Americans find themselves in a
tricky position: They need a gun to defend themselves or their homes right now,
and yet the only way they can legally purchase one is to submit to a long-term
and wholly unpredictable bureaucratic process. If you’re in a hurry — as Carol
Bowne was — this is a substantial problem. Arguably, abiding by the rules cost
Bowne her life.
There can be few clearer illustrations of the folly of
draconian firearms regulations than this. The killer was a convicted felon who
had previously been found guilty of weapons offenses and aggravated assault,
and who is now on the run from federal authorities. The victim was a “bubbly,
well-liked,” law-abiding woman who did not want to run afoul of the government
even when she sensed that her life was in danger. If “government” is just
another word for the things we do together, then, frankly, we failed — and
damnably. All Carol Bowne asked was that she be permitted to exercise her right
to protect herself in her own home; instead, she ended up bleeding to death in
her driveway, as the paper-pushers and know-it-alls decided whether they would
deign to indulge her request, and her killer sped away, without fear of
retaliation or injury.
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