State-Journal.com - Q & A: Charles Riggs, Co-Founder of Kentucky Coalition To Carry Concealed, Firing back at his critics

Photo By Hilly Schiffer Charles Riggs poses for a photo with his dog, Churchill, while holding an M1 Garand standard battle rifle that his father made to resemble guns he used in World War II.

Last month Charles Riggs and several other members of Kentucky Coalition to Carry Concealed attended a City Commission meeting while openly carrying firearms and wearing T-shirts that read "Gun Nut for Public Safety." Earlier the commission had discussed installing a metal detector to prevent concealed firearms at public meetings. It was prompted by the deadly shooting in Kirkwood, Mo., on Feb. 7 that left two police officers and three city officials dead. Riggs says the City Commission and much of the public and press are woefully uninformed on firearms issues. He recently sat down at a picnic table in South Frankfort with Staff Writer Charlie Pearl and talked more about the demonstration at City Hall and his frustrations concerning gun issues.

When did you first get interested in guns?
I was raised with guns. My father was firearms instructor for the Kentucky State Police and I grew up in a houseful of guns. My father (the late Shelby Riggs) was not only an instructor but an enthusiast. He taught me firearm safety.

Can you say how many guns you own?
No. It's more than one. It's more than I necessarily need but not as many as I'd like to have because there are guns that I'm interested in from a collector's standpoint that I think would be fun to own to be able to take out and shoot " guns that are not necessarily practical or that I don't have an absolute need for but some that would be interesting from a historical or technical standpoint.

Do you hunt?
I don't hunt now. When I was a boy and with my father we went out and hunted groundhogs, varmints basically. The whole pursuit of it is interesting to me but I basically don't have time to indulge in it as much as I'd like.

Is target shooting something you do frequently?
Target shooting is something I enjoy. What I'm primarily concerned with because of the political climate that we live in is the business of firearms for personal defense " not just firearms but knives, whatever. I have a 25-year-old daughter. I taught my daughter about tools for her own safety from a very early age. That was to inoculate her against fear and to give her what she needed to be safe in an uncertain world. Now this is one of the things that is most troubling to me. Women, oftentimes, are some of the most vocal opponents of firearms ownership but more than that, against self-defense. They benefit from active self-defense more than any other group. I do not ever want to go to bed knowing my daughter suffered because I did not give her the tools to take care of herself. It's a matter of living a self-sufficient life in which you have the ability to determine your own fate as much as is humanly possible.

What was the purpose of the Gun Nut For Public Safety demonstration at City Hall in March?
The purpose was to show that we are tired of being misrepresented and misnamed and the whole business of firearms in public places being misunderstood here in Frankfort. There were several things that were involved in that demonstration. One was The State Journal's editorial staff choosing to refer to people who supported the right to bear arms in defense of themselves in public places as "gun nuts.' We strenuously object to that. If you're not going to call somebody a spic or a nigger or a faggot, then you shouldn't call me a gun nut. It's bigotry. It's a term intended to wound or demean. The editorial staff at The State Journal used the term specifically to denigrate us and we didn't appreciate it. The other thing we were doing was showing we did not appreciate the misunderstandings that were quite evident on the part of the City Commission. One of the commissioners, Kathy Carter, had floated a proposal to ban firearms from City Hall and from meetings completely. Of course they found out they could not do that but she would have been happy to do that had she not been informed that was illegal. Lynn Bowers then subsequently said, "Oh, nobody was ever really serious about that,' which, of course is not the case. The problem that we have with all of this, and the reason we were there, is legal gun owners do not pose a threat to the public. You have well over 60,000 concealed carry permits issued in Kentucky. Those people have been through background checks. They have demonstrated they have the ability to display good judgment. They don't have criminal records. They've not been disbarred from the possession of firearms. So that's like saying, "Well, we know you've got a driver's license but we really just don't trust you because something about your enthusiasm for fast cars scares us, so we prefer you not drive.' So we are empowered to carry a firearm by our basic human rights for self-defense. We are authorized by the state to carry those firearms in a particular way based upon our good behavior. So why is it something that uninformed politicians and uninformed journalists seek to continue to hammer us about? We're tired of it. So we went there to make a statement about our rights and to demonstrate to the public that there are people out there who still understand their rights and are tired of being misrepresented.

So you feel the press, including The State Journal, is biased toward gun owners?
The majority of the press in this country and certainly The State Journal's editorial staff, by and large, have a deep mistrust and misunderstanding of firearms. And worse than that, they're not interested in learning anything more about them, and about firearms laws and about firearms owners. Yet no one seeks to do anything about it except us. The journalists are quite happy calling a cartridge a bullet when it's not. They use in some cases blatantly incorrect terminology and when we've offered to attempt to correct that misinformation they've rebuffed us.

What are the biggest public misconceptions about guns?
Trying to make public policy without knowing what the statistics are. They quote outdated statistics about a gun in the home is 43 more times more likely to be used against the members of the home. Well, that's a very bad statistic and it's been thoroughly debunked. They quote statistics they don't know, they don't have any pedigree for, and they can't produce any substantiation for because it supports their contention that guns are dangerous. Well, yes, of course a gun is dangerous. So is a hammer, so is a blender, so is a lawnmower. If someone working for the public used the same lack of data to buy cars or vehicles for city government that they do in making judgments about personal safety then they wouldn't stay in office very long. There are well over 200 million firearms in this country. Now how many attacks against public officials in public places are committed over the course of the decade? It seems like a lot because it's obviously a tragedy every time it happens. But it's not a lot. It's the same thing if you were never to fly because planes crash, you would be ignoring the fact that planes fly millions of miles every day, every year. The safety record for airlines is superb. What I'd like to see changed is for reality to intrude into public discussions. For people not to be guided by their emotional responses and not to cherry pick statistics that are not correct. People who own guns are your friends, your neighbors, your relatives.

Are there any weapons you think people should not be allowed to own?
That comes into a gray area that's difficult for people. Part of the problem you have to understand is most people accept that there are probably some reasonable regulations on the ownership of firearms. The problem with that is the slippery slope that we've observed in the past. New York City several years ago said we're going to require that you register your firearms with us here in the city and nothing will ever come of it, everything will be fine. Well, several years down the road they suddenly announced everyone who ever registered any of these rifles in the city of New York now has until X date to remove them from the city. And if they don't we're going to use our registration information to come and either seize them or arrest and imprison you. And this is the thing that you're not to get gun owners to accept in good faith " anything that might even considered to be reasonable regulation because of the past misconduct of public officials. Every time they've ever been given an opportunity to place a registration of firearms and to locate them and identify them and locate their owners and identify them, they have then subsequently turned it against those firearms owners and enacted new more draconian regulation. It's a simple fact of history and this is another thing that is troublesome to us " the people who want to ban firearms continue to deny that history. They'll lie about it and say, "No that never happened,' when the historical record is played and that's why it's like once bitten, twice shy. We would like to say, "OK, there may be something that we'd like to see regulated.' Obviously no one wants flame throwers in everybody's hands and nobody wants to see machine guns as something routinely available across the counter. But on the occasions when we have made good faith compromises with gun regulators, we have been burned. So we're holding a line " no more regulation.

What do you think of people who support restrictions on the right to bear arms?
It depends on the individual. Some people do it as a knee-jerk reaction out of fear. A lot of people genuinely believe they're going to accomplish something much like these people who are rushing off a cliff to follow Al Gore over global warming. They believe in a cause and they're going to blindly pursue that cause because of the emotional content. Those people are simplistic and really there's not much you can say to them because to them it's a religion.

Can you respect them for having their thoughts?
Well, really basically, no.

Everybody needs to think like you?
No. It's not a matter of thinking like me. It's a matter of thinking. When you think and you look at what it is that you are attempting to accomplish and what it is that you're asking then you're not going to ask the things these people ask. Now the people who genuinely believe that there are reasonable restrictions and that we can reach some sort of compromise and are truthful in their hearts, I can respect that. But they are few and far between. Those people who choose to deny reality, I can't respect because they're walking around with blinders on and they expect me and my friends and my family to be dragged down to their level of helplessness by their ignorance.

Do you feel you sleep better at night because you have guns?
I sleep better at night because I feel I'm doing something to help not only myself but to preserve our freedoms and to help other people. I sleep better at night because I'm surrounded by six dogs that love me. I sleep better at night because I know I have a good relationship with a smart young woman that I helped raise.

Is there anything else you would like to say?
People assume we're doing what we do, and I'm doing what I do because of some desire for personal glory, for personal attention. That is not at all the case. I have taught a lot of classes and given a lot of assistance in a lot of different areas, helped with animal rescue, done a lot of things that were not intended to shower any glory on me at all. What I do with firearms is for my own self. But what I'm forced to do in the public arena to protect our rights and protect our ability to own firearms is something that I do for all of us and not for any personal attention. If I were only looking for personal attention there are a lot of other things that I could do that wouldn't give me the kind of grief that this does. I have to deal with people who don't know me, who don't understand me, speaking critically of me. Some of them calling me some pretty ugly names and I could do without that.