The White House's Petition to Support H.R. 822, the National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Act of 2011

OK, so it’s not the White House petitioning the rest of the nation to support concealed-carry reciprocity, but it is a petition on the White House’s website, WhiteHouse.gov.  But that doesn’t make it any less your chance to state your support for concealed-carry reciprocity.  Here’s a little bit from the White House’s very own FAQ:

“The right to petition your government is guaranteed by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. We the People provides a new way to petition the Obama Administration to take action on a range of important issues facing our country. We created We the People because we want to hear from you. If a petition gets enough support, White House staff will review it, ensure it’s sent to the appropriate policy experts, and issue an official response.

“For example, right now, the threshold for a petition is 5,000 petition signatures in 30 days. If a large number of petitions are reaching that threshold, it may increase so that the workload is manageable and so that we can respond in a timely fashion.”

Right now the petition is about 1800 signatures deep and has ’til the 22nd of October to get an official response.  There’s another cool petition on there, too, one to repeal the Firearms Owners’ Protection Act, which bans the sale of automatic weapons made after 1986, restricting the number of people who can afford them to just the wealthy.

And the petition calls into question a really valid point: it’s not like an MP5 made today is any less dangerous than a Mac 10 made thirty years ago.  Let’s be honest, the FOPA is really just a form of gun prohibition that money can get around; it doesn’t really protect firearm owners at all.  It’s got ’til the 28th and has a long way to go.

Of course, if you’re wary of using your name and email address in any White House-related venue, afraid that they might do something nefarious with it, just work on the assumption that they already know your email and have in their database, and sign the petitions anyway.  Or like, use a spam email account, yeesh.

Side note: after I created my account and signed in for the first time, I got an error message.  I had to log out and log back in, but after that it worked fine.  I mention this because here I am, signing my name to a petition that has a teensy-weensy chance of directly affecting government, restoring some of our civil rights, and as soon I as I confirm my account, I got hit with this:

Perfect, isn’t it?