From marijuana nullification, to the IR wanting your oil money- below is a selection of some of the other stories you may have missed over the weekend.
20 Gun bills may be moving forward in the upcoming Montana Legislative Session, as author John Lott points out:
One big change would be to join Alaska, Arizona, and Vermont in not requiring a permit for carrying a concealed handgun within the state. Right now a permit is not required “for a law-abiding person to carry a concealed weapon in 99.4% of Montana – outside the limits of cities or towns.” They will also try to greatly reduce the number of gun free zones.
Meanwhile, The Electric City Weblog’s Gregg Smith puts the libertarian twist on the marijuana mutiny that occurred in Missoula.
A Missoula jury puts a new spin on the concept of jury nullification, apparently refusing to even be seated in a trial concerning a small amount of marijuana:
This raises an interesting point. At what point does the collective criminalize the citizens to the point that the citizens simply refuse to be criminalized?
Imagine the outrage from the left if a jury nullifies federal endangered species act laws by refusing to convict a man who shoots a wolf. Click here to read the original article in The Missoulian.
Plus, you can break down this editorial in The Helena Independent Record to those of you folks in Eastern Montana by simply saying: The IR wants your oil money. While I typically ignore the comments section of online newspaper articles, I got a kick out of this one:
I would like to challenge any of the western Montana leg. to locate Lambert, Savage and Fairview (not Fairfield) on a map. How many have been east of Billings, ever? Richland County has to maintain about 70 miles of paved secondary as the state cannot afford it. There are over 20 miles of 201 that signed as rough road today, it carries over 200 trucks per day, more than US 93 from Missoula to Polson. Bainville and Culbertson have both about doubled their school enrollments this year. The state gets half the money right now. Did Jeff Co. ‘share the wealth’ from the gold mine? Will L&C ‘share the wealth’ from Marysville, or will that go away because of the enviros? I went to school in a two room rural school where we hauled water from a pump jack and had outhouses. No sharing from the mines in Butte or the timber in Libby or the Al plant in Co Falls! The first horizontal/frac well is within 400 yds of the house I was raised in and Dad drove teams for Henry Elm (Elm Coulee) Western MT, it’s easy, cut your timber instead of watching it burn, extract your minerals, drill the 2 Med and Front Range. You have been making fun of West Dakota for so long, just leave it alone and sent back ALL the money, have your kids sweep the floors and clean the toilets, since I am sure you all have running water.
And, it looks like the pundits are getting an early start on the quotes of the year. Liberal talk show host Alan Colmes says Montana Congressman Denny Rehberg made his list, with this:
Then there are the random crazies, who only rear their empty heads occasionally, such as Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont., who, while visiting a tool-making factory, told the owners, “If Obama is president, maybe you need to spend more time developing a gun lock, a trigger lock.”
Of course, Colmes took the liberal line that the joke somehow suggested harm may come to the president. Meanwhile, any level headed Montanan understands that the joke clearly references the surge in gun and ammo purchases that followed Obama’s election. Gun owners feared Obama would launch an assault on second amendment rights and therefore gun sales surged.