Utah man harassed by cops for open carrying

It would seem that some cops in Utah aren’t up on the legality of open carry. From the article here:

Deveraux said he was walking around his neighborhood to exercise last December, when he was stopped by a Granite School District officer and “was informed that if I touched my gun, I would be killed.” The officer called the West Valley City Police Department, Deveraux continued, three squad cars arrived, and he was detained and his gun taken from him - then, after a few minutes, he was released.

Those were violations of his federal and state constitutional rights, said the Swede who became an American citizen this January. And they are civil rights abuses that he has only encountered in West Valley City, Deveraux said.

“I don’t blame them for being a little bit extra careful,” he said, noting that the crime rate is high in Utah’s second largest city, “but there’s a line they crossed between being a little bit careful and a little bit too careful.”

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Utah to Eliminate Out of State CPL’s?

Gun permits shoot up

Reject applications from out of state, some say
By Lisa Riley Roche

As the number of concealed weapons permits issued by Utah continues to climb, public safety officials told lawmakers Wednesday it might be time to stop accepting applications from out-of-state.

By the end of the year, Utah is projected to have issued more than 40,000 concealed weapons permits — nearly a 150 percent increase over 2007 and more than a 250 percent boost from 2006.

Slightly more than half of the permit applications received since the beginning of the budget year on July 1, 2007, have gone to Utahns. But since 1994, about two-thirds of the applications have come from out-of-state.

“This program has been growing by leaps and bounds,” Lt. Doug Anderson, who runs the concealed weapons permit program for the Utah Department of Public Safety, told members of the Legislature’s Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee.

The increase in applications has boosted revenues from the program to about $1 million annually, up from a projected $600,000 or so. That’s enabled the department to cut the time it takes to process an application from three months to just one, Anderson said.

But committee member Sen. Bill Hickman, R-St. George, was more interested in why the state was issuing concealed weapons permits to non-Utahns rather than simply relying on existing reciprocity agreements with other states.

Those agreements allow concealed weapons permits to be treated like a drivers license. For example, someone with a Utah driver’s license may legally drive in other states just as someone with a license issued by another state may legally drive in Utah.

Public safety officials said the long-standing practice of issuing permits to non-Utahns has left them with problems, including policing out-of-state instructors teaching a required course to obtain the Utah permit. Some 70 percent of the Utah-certified instructors don’t live here.

“We would welcome some clarification,” Public Safety Commissioner Scott Duncan told the committee, reminding them the state has already stopped issue permits to non-U.S. residents last year for similar reasons.

He said any benefit to the state from issuing permits to non-Utahns “would be hard to know” when asked by another committee member, Sen. Scott McCoy, D-Salt Lake, to come up with pluses of the program.

Later, Duncan said he’s recommending the state stop issuing the permits to non-Utahns but the decision is up to lawmakers. “We’ll do it any way they want us to do it,” he said, adding, “I think we need to look out for our state first.”

One of the strongest gun-rights advocates in the Legislature, Rep. Curt Oda, R-Clearfield, who also sits on the committee, said the question he would ask about issuing concealed weapons permits to non-Utahns is simply, “Why not?”

Oda said after the meeting that he would oppose eliminating out-of-state permits.

“An American is an American,” he said. “I don’t care if he’s a New York American or a Utah American, as citizens we have rights.”

E-mail: lisa@desnews.com

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ID10T

As much as I am loathe to critisize a fellow gun owner, this guy isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. He comes home and discovers evidence of a burglary in progress, and what does he do? He charges in, gets whacked in the head and shot in the arm with his own gun.

In my opinion, unless you have a very good reason to, like a loved one trapped inside the house, call the cops and let them take care of it. They get paid for it.

Morley decided to go inside the house, located near 6000 West Eaton Way, and retrieve his handgun to fend off the intruder. Moments later, the two men started wrestling for control and Morley was eventually shot in the arm.

“We both fought over the gun and he hit me in the head,” Morley said. “My hands were just completely covered in blood.”

…

“I knew something was going on. I catch shoplifters for a living, so there’s a lot of people that would probably like to know a lot about me,” Morley said. “So I always carry my gun with me… constantly, it’s right by me.”

Funny, for someone who always carries a gun with him, he had to go into his house to retrieve it. I wonder how many shoplifters this guy actually catches.

*sigh*

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