January 26, 2011

Here in Salt Lake City, the State Legislature is considering a bill to honor the Browning M1911 pistol by making it the official state firearm. That’s right, a committee in the Utah House of Representatives voted 9 to 2 this week to approve a bill that would add the Browning pistol to the pantheon of official state things, along with the bird (seagull), rock (coal), dance (square), and official state cooking pot (Dutch oven). “This firearm is Utah,” Representative Carl Wimmer, the Browning bill’s sponsor, told The Salt Lake Tribune. Capitol observers say the Browning bill has an excellent chance of becoming law. Last Monday, the Utah State Capitol celebrated Browning Day, honoring John Moses Browning, native son and maker of the nominee for Official State Firearm. There were speeches, a proclamation, a flyover by a National Guard helicopter, and, of course, a rotunda full of guns. “We recognize his efforts to preserve the Constitution,” Gov. Gary Herbert said, in keeping with what appears to be a new Republican regulation requiring all party members to mention the Constitution at least once in every three sentences. It is generally not a good idea to dwell on the strange behavior of the state legislature since it leads to bottomless despair. For example, Mark Madsen, a Utah state senator, tried to improve upon the Browning Day celebrations by suggesting they be scheduled to coincide with Martin Luther King Day since “both made tremendous contributions to individual freedom and individual liberty.” But it’s a symptom of a new streak of craziness abroad in the land, which wants to introduce guns into every conceivable part of American life: National parks, schools, bars, airports. Especially in Utah, where the second-least amount of money is spent on education per child of all the states, but one legislator wants to make gun training mandatory in schools. “There is abundant research suggesting in cities where more people own guns, the crime rate, especially the murder rate, goes down,” Utah’s new United States senator, Mike Lee, told CNN. Actually, there’s a ton of debate about this, which is hard to resolve given the fact that, as Michael Luo reported in The New York Times, the N.R.A.’s crack lobbyists have managed to stop almost all federal financing for scientific research on gun-related questions. But Lee has definitely made the list of most creative commentators on these matters, ever since he dismissed calls for a calmer political rhetoric after the Tucson massacre by arguing that “the shooter wins if we, who’ve been elected, change what we do just because of what he did.” And, Jason Chaffetz, the congressman from Utah County’s response to the shooting of congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was that he was going to start wearing his gun more. Obviously, God dwells here. And he’s carrying a gun.