Indy Newspaper Asks Whether State Should Ban Carrying Guns in Bars

There are a number of places that are off-limits in even many pro-gun states. One of those is bars. The reasoning, such as it is, makes sense on the surface. Guns and alcohol tend not to mix very well. With inhibitions down from alcohol, people may make decisions they ordinarily wouldn’t, and that could lead to violent outcomes.

I’ve seen too many ordinarily peaceful people take a swing at someone else in a bar to not recognize that.

But not everyone who goes into a bar drinks. We have designated drivers, for example, who go to the bar but abstain for safety reasons.

Still, in Indiana, with a couple of high-profile shootings in bars, the Indy Star seems to think that the state should be the latest to add bars to the prohibited places list.

Recent shootings at Central Indiana bars have left policymakers looking for ways to combat the violence.

A triple shooting inside a downtown Indianapolis bar and the death of a man who was shot in the head inside a popular Fishers bar have prompted calls for Indiana to revisit its gun and alcohol laws.

Many states prohibit guns inside bars. Twenty-seven states and Washington, D.C., restrict carrying firearms in at least some establishments that serve alcohol, according to Giffords Law Center, a gun control group.

But Indiana isn’t one of them.

Kelly Drane, research director at Giffords, said studies have shown that people who are under the influence of alcohol are more likely to be victims of gun violence and to perpetrate gun violence.

“Guns and alcohol are a potent and potentially lethal combination,” she said. “When states fail to enact policy to regulate firearms in these areas, it creates a less safe environment for all of us.”

Nationally, restrictions on guns in bars have broad support, even among gun owners. A recent national survey by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions found that 79% of Americans supported prohibiting gun carrying in bars, including 72% of gun owners. 

But any move to restrict where guns can be carried is unlikely to find a warm reception at the Indiana General Assembly, where Republicans control supermajorities in both chambers. Lawmakers in recent years have focused on reducing restrictions on guns, culminating in the elimination of Indiana’s handgun permit requirement in 2022.

The report cites an investigation from the paper that found 49 people had been killed and another 154 wounded in “shootings and stabbings” in bars in the state as evidence that something needs to be done. However, the investigation in question doesn’t seem to differentiate how many were killed or injured by gunshot and how many were stabbed.

In other words, the author is using the statistic as justification for gun regulations while lumping in stabbings into the equation. There’s also no mention of whether any of these shootings were self-defense, which shouldn’t be surprising.

After all, their “expert” is someone from Giffords.

That means they were looking for confirmation for what they wanted to push, not a reasonable reason why it’s a bad idea.

For one thing, let’s look at the constitutionality of such a regulation. Sure, sensitive places are permissible, as confirmed by the Bruen decision, but are bars among them? We know that prohibiting people from carrying a gun in public while drinking is allowable under the Constitution, because such laws were actually common at the time of the founding.

But this does more than tell people they can’t drink and carry a firearm. It tells everyone they can’t carry one in a bar.

So, either they’re disarmed when out for the evening, even if they’re not going to drink, or they have to leave their guns in their vehicles. Where do we keep hearing local officials gripe about guns being stolen in recent years? That’s right, from people’s vehicles.

In fact, clusters of gun thefts also correspond in many places with gun-free establishments.

A better solution should be something along the lines of prohibiting people from carrying while drinking. Will that solve the problem? Not necessarily, because that Indy Star report that laid out how many were shot or stabbed seems to suggest that the issue is the bars themselves. Every community has some bars that you just don’t go to if you don’t want trouble, and those that do want trouble aren’t going to pay attention to any law about carrying guns in drinking establishments.

But somehow, I don’t think anyone the reporter spoke to at Giffords clued them in on this little tidbit.

I wonder why?

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