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08-20-2010, 02:31 AM
August 19, 2010

Gun rights organization takes aim at Charleston

By Rusty Marks
The Charleston Gazette

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Leaders of West Virginia's largest gun rights lobby are taking aim at Charleston's latest gun control initiative.
Earlier this week, Charleston Police Chief Brent Webster announced Project Gun Safe, a multi-pronged program asking the local community to help police get guns off of the city's streets.

The program includes a gun buyback program for unwanted guns, $100 to informants who give police information that leads to an arrest for an illegal weapon and an option to allow citizens to write down the manufacturers and serial numbers of all their weapons and give the information to the police department in case the weapons are stolen, lost or turn up in a crime.

Although Webster said registering their guns with the city was entirely voluntary, the thought of turning over lists of firearms to city officials didn't sit well with members of the West Virginia Citizens Defense League, a lobbying group and the state's largest organization of gun owners.

"The definition of voluntary is always going to be questionable if the guy asking you to volunteer has a gun, a badge and the power of the government behind him," said West Virginia Citizens Defense League president Keith Morgan.

Morgan, a Charleston resident, said the citizens defense league has several hundred members throughout the state. The group lobbies on gun rights issues, and was active in helping convince state lawmakers to pass the state's castle doctrine law in 2008. The law puts into writing West Virginia citizens' right to use deadly force to defend themselves in their own homes.

Morgan and other members of the defense league fear that registration -- voluntary or otherwise -- is the first step in an outright ban on guns. "Gun registration is a necessary prerequisite to gun confiscation," Morgan said in a news release this week.

But Webster said Charleston officials aren't out to catalog or confiscate anyone's guns. "It's purely voluntary," the police chief said. "You don't have to turn the [registration] card in to us."

Webster said the point of offering to keep records of city residents' guns is to help track them down if they're lost or stolen.

"It is unbelievable how many times a gun is stolen and the owners don't have the serial number," he said. At the very least, he said, gun owners should write down the makes and serial numbers of their weapons and store them apart from the guns.

"What we really want to accomplish is that they record the serial numbers," Webster said. "That's good enough for us.

"I believe in the Second Amendment," the police chief said. "This is not about the Second Amendment. It's public safety."

Morgan said Charleston has the most restrictive gun laws in the state. In 1999, the Legislature passed a law prohibiting cities from passing prohibitive gun laws, but left Charleston's ordinances in place. Among Charleston's gun laws are a three-day waiting period to buy a gun and a limit of one gun per month for buyers.

Charleston passed the laws in 1993 to try to stop out-of-state drug dealers from buying large quantities of cheap guns in the city, then selling them for a profit in New York or other large cities. They would then buy cheap drugs in the cities and sell them for a profit in West Virginia.

Supporters such as longtime Charleston City Councilman Tom Lane said the ordinances worked in stemming the guns-for-drugs trade.

But Morgan said the result was different laws in different parts of the state. The West Virginia Citizens Defense League is lobbying lawmakers to rescind Charleston's ordinances and make city gun laws uniform statewide.

Morgan said there was one part of Project Gun Safe that the defense league agrees with. At a news conference this week, Kanawha County prosecutor Mark Plants said he would crack down on gun criminals by asking for maximum penalties on gun crimes and making it harder for those accused of gun crimes to make bond.

"Legal gun owners have long called for more stringent enforcement rather than more regulation," Morgan said.

Reach Rusty Marks at rustyma...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1215.

http://www.wvgazette.com/News/201008190664
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Steve