Leave the Hardware at Home

When the 2002 Winter Olympics get underway in February, thousands of guards will patrol Salt Lake City and the nearby sports venues, radar planes will watch from above and devices to detect chemical and biological attacks will be activated. About $300 million has been earmarked for these extraordinary measures to make sure that foreign terrorists or some home-grown yahoos don’t cause mayhem.

So there’s not much cause to weep for the 41,800 men and women in Utah legally allowed to carry concealed weapons but not allowed to take them to the Olympics. A number of them feel royally put out that not only are they forbidden to carry their guns to Olympic events, they won’t have special nearby lockers to stash them in.

In 1999, as Utah began to gear up for its Olympian moment, state lawmakers banned firearms at the sports venues and in nine blocks of downtown Salt Lake City. Die-hard gun advocates in this gun-friendly state weren’t at all happy about that. The law said that secure lockers may be provided so gun owners could check their weapons at the door but did not require Olympic organizers to provide them. Now, with just weeks to go before the opening ceremony, the organizing committee has told spectators that no storage lockers will be available. Leave your guns at home or in your car, it advises.

“They have not been very friendly to us at all,� said one gun-rights leader, who complained that the committee’s decision is unfair.

This is an issue in dire need of perspective. Ground zero in New York is still a round-the-clock morgue, the culprits in the anthrax attacks are still at large and just last weekend a man tried to detonate explosives in his shoe aboard a jetliner over the Atlantic. If the Olympic organizers have concluded that athletes and fans will be safer if personal handguns are nowhere near the stadiums and ski courses, not even gathered in cabinets at the door, we wholeheartedly applaud. Unhappy gun owners should save their crocodile tears.