REXBURG LIFE: “Guns. Yes We Can!”
By Dallan Wright
What you see here is a collection of guns in Rexburg, Idaho. This may cause alarm in a larger city like New York or Washington D.C., but in Rexburg we call this par for the course.
This also reminds me of the fun my friends and I achieved upon buying a couple boxes of .22 shells and heading out to the desert. It amazes me that our wild rabbit hunting/shoot everything in sight, sessions did not result in anything worse than a little scratch from a ricochet. It must have been a testament to Mr. Dearings 6th grade hunters education class, or a large helping of dumb luck some of us use up in our youth.
I couldn’t think of Rexburg without the sounds of rifle shots, the sight of gun racks, or the smell of discharged gun powder mixed with sage brush. Some things just go together like (name your favorite two things here), and hopefully always will.
Firearms are an interesting part of our society here in the Rexburg area. Having owned a firearms dealership and gunsmithing service here for about six years I have gained a new perspective on firearms ownership in our community. I think it’s obvious to most that over the last few years the number of gun racks in trucks have certainly decreased. But their are some other statistics you may not be aware of.
Since the enactment of the Brady Law in 1993 and the creation of the FBI’s National Instant Check System, firearms dealers like myself have been required to run background checks on everyone who purchases a firearm. There is only one exception to this rule, and that is to present identification which qualifies as an exemption to background check. In Idaho we can obtain Concealed Weapons Licenses (CWL) which serves this purpose. In the last six years the number of CWL holders has greatly increased. I would say the number of licenses to gun buyers has gone from about 1 in 5 in 1993 to about 2 in 3 today. To me this says that our local population are not only not worried about passing a background check when they buy guns, but they are willing to walk in and face the Sheriff and say, “I’m a citizen of this nation and I want to exercise my right to bear arms.” To do this they submit themselves to a more in depth background check including fingerprinting.
The other interesting statistic is that in my six years in business and after transferring several hundred firearms to customers only on one occasion has a person been found ineligible by the FBI to receive a firearm. That happened to be a case of a person who was retired and did not realize that the 1993 enactment of the Brady Law made him ineligible to purchase firearms due to a felony he had committed some 40 years ago as a young adult.
To me these statistics speak greatly of the high caliber (no pun intended) of people we have in this community. Of course neither of these statistics will ever reflect the true criminals who do not buy firearms from licensed dealers but obrain them from unlawful methods which no law will ever control. But that is a rant for another time and place.
My hat is off to the good people of this area, keep it up and please don’t shoot holes in it.
Great explanation about the current state of gun ownership. I hope you continue to educate us on this issue.