Just as the left has begun its renewed assault on guns on the national stage, David Orentlicher, one of our illustrious Democrat legislators, has decided perhaps it is time to attack our rights on the state level. He has used the old caveat of "if you want safety, you'll need to give up some of that freedom."

Let me first start by providing a little history. And history's great; I love history. I'm a fan. And the history of the story is, many years ago Indiana was one of those states with umpteen little laws governing where someone could carry a firearm legally and where someone couldn't. It was up to the municipalities. For example, in crime-ridden Gary, they were as restrictive or more so than nearby Chicago, while in Jasper County a bit further south you were only restricted by state law. This created such a dizzying patchwork of laws, especially where dozens of little towns ran together (like near Chicago), that the state legislature rightly passed a law saying that the locals had to adhere to the state law, which required a permit for concealed carry, but otherwise wasn't terribly restrictive.

Critics of the legislature's move, as has been predicted for every laxing of restrictive gun laws across the nation, predicted blood in the streets, mass slayings where several people would pull guns and shoot it out, "Wild West style". None of it happened, of course.

What did happen was the meth trade started getting pretty bad. All urban areas were plagued with high crime rates during that time and they either caved and let the violence happen or the criminals were sent en masse to prison using a mix of federal and local prosecutions. We enjoyed a decade or so of some peace while those felons rotted in jail, but the meth trade is back and bigger than ever. Weaker sentencing, old criminals getting out of jail and a new crop of crooks have all combined to give us a brand new crime wave.

The answer according to Orentlicher and his ilk is that the legislature should allow municipalities to have stricter gun laws again. See, the rest of the state doesn't understand Indianapolis' plight or Gary's plight and therefore if they want to restrict their citizen's freedoms and make more of them vulnerable to crime, well, David thinks that's ok.

David and other legislators would just as soon see guns banned, which of course has led to the crime-free paradises of Great Britain, Canada and Australia (all seeing violent crime spikes since their bans) and our utopian megaplexes of Chicago, New York, Detroit and LA. Will they ever learn? My money's on no. Still, I hold on to that faint hope, and I hold onto the fact that there's enough people who still pay attention to legislators like him and ensure his Bill dies the death it deserves.

Represenative Orentlicher needs to learn that stripping freedoms from the average citizen only emboldens criminals and fattens government. Neither one of those is good for the average citizen, of course, but he may see it differently. I for one would like to hear his thoughts on that matter.