A gun-friendly political climate for decades has both reflected and supported Arizona's firearm lifestyle that started in the untamed territorial days and remains an element of the state's culture, economy and image.
Pioneer towns such as Phoenix and Tombstone were founded by tough men who always carried two guns and a knife, said Bob Boze Bell, executive editor of Cave Creek-based True West Magazine.
At one point, Bell said, Tombstone had 10,000 such residents and 66 bars, yet only 14 homicides over several years. Still, as women and children moved in, and as municipal governments took root, local anti-gun ordinances were adopted. Even in Tombstone, Arizona's legendary "town too tough to die."
The most famous gunfight in the state's history was, partly, a dispute over guns. An attempt by Wyatt Earp, his brothers and their ally Doc Holliday to disarm a group of cowboys led to the deadly 1881 shootout near the O.K. Corral, a confrontation immortalized in Hollywood Westerns.
"The laws are looser now than they were in the Old West," said Bell, a writer and illustrator whose books include "Bad Men: Outlaws and Gunfighters of the Wild West" and three volumes of his "Classic Gunfights" series. "You could not carry a gun in Tombstone."
Gun-control advocates will sometimes argue that Arizona's Wild West days are long over and that a different attitude toward guns is overdue. That call for increased regulation of firearms in the state actually is more than 100 years old.
During the pre-statehood 1910 constitutional convention, Arizona's founders included a special protection for individual gun rights in the state constitution that went beyond the language of even the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
"The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself or the state shall not be impaired," the draft constitution said.
It was not without controversy, minutes of the proceedings show. A motion to scratch the provision was made on the grounds that "we are no longer a frontier country" and guns, in addition to being dangerous, weren't needed anymore.
The motion was watered down to give the Legislature the power to regulate the carrying of weapons "to prevent crime" but was narrowly rejected on a 23-22 vote.
Decades later, Arizona would allow legally carried concealed weapons, a reform that has expanded in one form or another to nearly every state, and for the past 20 years generally has been at the forefront of expanding gun rights on the state level.
Alan Korwin, the author of the definitive guide to Arizona gun statutes and operator of the website www.gunlaws.com, said the gun-control ordinances adopted by Tombstone and some other Arizona towns were tossed as Second Amendment violations after Arizona became a state in 1912.
But over the past half-century, federal gun restrictions ballooned out of control, Korwin said. In his book, he says U.S. gun laws now contain 83,000 words, with more than half of those adopted after 1970.
Strong feelings of tradition
For decades, the gun-control action was centered in Washington, D.C. The Arizona Legislature's emphasis on gun bills is a relatively recent phenomenon. Several longtime Arizona elected officials on both sides of the debate told The Arizona Republic that they don't recall state lawmakers spending much, if any, time on gun legislation in the 1960s or 1970s.However, Arizona political leadership's support of gun rights and antagonism toward federal gun control date back at least to the dawn of the modern era of firearm regulation.
Long-serving U.S. Sen. Carl Hayden, D-Ariz., was a former territorial Maricopa County sheriff and an expert marksman who kept historic guns in his Senate office. A little more than two months after JFK's death, Hayden made headlines by holding up a .38 revolver at a Senate Commerce Committee meeting on legislation to ban the mail-order sales of guns. Hayden, who was born in 1877 and was then 86, found the pistol on a witness table along with other confiscated firearms.
"Who shall I shoot?" Hayden mischievously asked, according to an account that appeared in the Jan. 31, 1964, edition of the Washington Post.
Hayden and a contingent of Arizonans appeared at the meeting to oppose the gun-control measure, some on grounds that an armed citizenry was a necessary safeguard against a lawless government or an invading army. Others warned that the measure would hurt ranchers and farmers who lived in rural areas and relied on the mail to buy guns.
Arizona Gov. Paul Fannin, a Republican who would win election to the U.S. Senate later that year, turned in a statement that implored Congress "not to be carried away by the hysteria of our president's assassination." Lee Harvey Oswald had purchased the Italian-made, Carcano rifle he used to kill Kennedy through the mail, but Fannin suggested that a better strategy would be to crack down on the importation of "worthless, cheap foreign weapons."
"Coming from the West, there is no doubt that Western feelings are strongly imbedded in the American tradition of the right to keep and bear arms," U.S. Rep. George Senner, D-Ariz., told the committee in a statement.
Mail-order gun sales eventually were outlawed under the Gun Control Act of 1968, landmark legislation signed by President Lyndon Johnson after the subsequent assassinations of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, D-N.Y. The law also made it illegal to sell guns to anyone indicted or convicted of crimes punishable by more than one year in prison, people who have been determined to be mentally ill or dishonorably discharged from the military, as well as drug addicts and illegal immigrants.
Hayden and Fannin, Arizona's two senators at the time, voted against it.
"Since '68, it's been one fight after another," said Bob Corbin, a former Arizona attorney general who served as National Rifle Association president in the early 1990s.
Battle over the Brady Bill
The 1968 bill was the first major gun legislation since the 1930s, when gangland warfare prompted Congress to regulate fully automatic machine guns and sawed-off shotguns. Decades later, Congress banned ownership of machine guns that were not registered as of May 19, 1986.Federal gun-control momentum returned to Capitol Hill in the 1990s, and again Arizonans played key roles in the legislative drama. President Bill Clinton signed the Brady Bill, more formally known as the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, in 1993. It was named for Jim Brady, the White House press secretary wounded in gunman John Hinckley Jr.'s attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan outside a Washington, D.C., hotel in 1981. The following year, lawmakers included a 10-year ban, which has since lapsed, on certain semiautomatic assault weapons in an anti-crime bill.
U.S. Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Ariz., had led the way on the assault-weapon ban, introducing the legislation several years in a row. Back home, DeConcini was targeted by an unsuccessful recall campaign in 1989 and in 1993 was marked for defeat by Corbin and the NRA. He ultimately decided not to seek re-election in 1994.
Pro-gun activists and lobbyists decried the Brady Bill and the assault-weapon ban as unconstitutional.
In 1994, an Arizona sheriff challenged the constitutionality of the Brady Bill's provision that required state and local law-enforcement officials to conduct five-day criminal-background checks on gun buyers. U.S. District Judge John Roll, who was slain in the Jan. 8 mass shooting near Tucson that also wounded U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., agreed with Graham County Sheriff Richard Mack that the requirement was a federal violation of states' rights under the 10th Amendment.
The Brady Bill case eventually got to the U.S. Supreme Court, which also sided with Mack on the point. The sheriff became a cult hero to gun-rights enthusiasts, writing a book titled "From My Cold Dead Fingers: Why America Needs Guns."
Mack lamented that no armed citizen was able to shoot the gunman once he opened fire on Giffords and Roll and others attending the congresswoman's constituent event outside a grocery store.
"I wish I'd been there to protect him," Mack said of Roll.
Bold steps and controversy
The year 1994 also marked Arizona's passage of its original law allowing concealed weapons to be carried by state-permitted gun owners. The decade saw the start of the Legislature's more aggressive defense of gun rights and the national controversy it inevitably brings.In 2000, Arizona House Speaker Jeff Groscost, R-Mesa, sparked a negative reaction by inviting actor Charlton Heston, then the NRA president, to deliver the invocation at the opening of the Legislature. Heston would speak even as then-Gov. Jane Dee Hull and some lawmakers were hoping to pass a bill that would upgrade the celebratory firing of guns in the air, a dangerous New Year's Eve practice in Arizona, to a felony. Gun-control advocates called Heston's appearance a slap in the face, even though Heston endorsed "Shannon's Law," named for a 14-year-old Phoenix girl who was killed by a falling bullet.
"I think that firing a gun in the air is about as stupid an undertaking as I can imagine," Heston told reporters at the Arizona House of Representatives. "Certainly no responsible gun owner would ever do that."
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2011/07/11/20110711arizona-guns-special-report-history.html#ixzz1RmuibANo
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