Well, the people in Michigan have been allowed to exercise their Second-Amendment rights for a year now, and the handwringers are still waiting for blood to flow in the streets a la Dodge City.

But Michael Zagaroli, a Grand Rapids attorney who represented the state’s police chiefs in their fight against the law, said it’s too early to draw conclusions.

“I can’t sit here and say there’s been a huge problem that has cropped up, but it’s only been one year. What may happen over five years? I just have to believe that injecting so many tens of thousands of additional guns into the public realm is not going to lead to good things.”

“I have to believe, brother! Testify! Show us the power!”

To heck with rationality, or statistics, or empirical results, or…reality. He has to believe, thus demonstrating that anti-gun hysteria is irrational, and religious in nature (which we knew all along).

Here’s another man who remains true to his faith:

Kent County Prosecutor William Forsyth expected the worst. He envisioned an armed populace “overreacting” and pulling guns to shoot purse snatchers. He was among 17 prosecutors across the state to quit their county’s gun boards in protest of the new law.

“You just can’t convince me that allowing everybody and anybody to carry a gun concealed on their person is going to make it a safer place to live,” Forsyth said at the time. He did not return calls for this report.

I particularly like that last sentence. Rather than speaking in tongues, his fervent worship has apparently struck him recently dumb. Errrrr…mute. Based on the above, it sounds like the dumbness has been a longer-term problem.

Oh, but wait!

Maybe this is the reason that Michiganians haven’t been perforated and desanguinated in record numbers over the past twelve months–they’ve been keeping the guns out of the hands of vicious criminals:

“Looking at your application, it shows you have a life- preserver violation,” said Ottawa County Assistant Prosecutor Gregory Babbitt, who ran the meeting.

Vitunskas sank in his chair as he recalled fishing for catfish on the Grand River in June 2001 with two buddies on his 10-foot, flat-bottom boat. He said he didn’t know it was a misdemeanor when he signed the DNR ticket for having two life jackets instead of three.

Sharp eyes, there, Mr. Prosecutor! That’s right, we all know that it starts with life preservers, and from there it’s straight down the steep and slippery slope to bank robberies.

But not all of the potential evildoers were so obvious:

A Grand Haven man was denied because he pruned a tree while deer hunting in a federal forest — a misdemeanor…

…Forrest Brown figured he’d breeze through. The 45-year-old Grand Haven man expected to walk out of Ottawa County’s May gun board meeting with a permit. His record is clean, except for the ticket he got from the state DNR in October 2000.

Brown said he didn’t know he was committing a misdemeanor when he trimmed branches of scrub oak in a national forest to create a shooting lane for his father, who recently had hip surgery.

Yes, it would never have occurred to me, but the authorities know better–it starts with trimming branches, then it moves on to felling whole trees, and the next thing you know the perp’s walking down Grand River Avenue plinking at baby carriages.

But alas–they’re not perfect. Here’s the one that slipped through the cracks, and really has me wiping sweat from my brow, as I contemplate the potential mayhem now that this fiend has gotten hold of a gun:

“There are still some holes in the system, some substantial holes,” she said. “This is very much a self-reporting system. It’s likely that if somebody wanted to represent themselves as having a clean record and had knowledge of how to do it, they may get away with it over a period of time.”

A hole became apparent at a recent Kent County gun board meeting as members considered an applicant named Jason. The board didn’t know about his misdemeanor criminal conviction for illegal use of a telephone in Montcalm County until he told them. A background check had turned up nothing.

They gave a gun to a…a…telephone user. And not just any telephone user, either. They gave it to an illegal telephone user. And I’ll bet it was a concealed phone, too.

This is a man who shouldn’t even be walking the streets, free to call people at will, perhaps telemarketing to them. But no, they not only let him roam free, but these incompetent ninnies give him a gun.

There’s no telling what nefarious activities he’s carrying out even as I type this, because of their malingering insouciance. He’s probably using one hand to sell long-distance service for 4.8 cents a minute, and gunning down innocents with the other.

Well, at least, as we start to get the first news reports from the Great Lake State of the great telephone and gun massacre (I’m sure it will happen any day now, if not any year), some peoples’ faith will be justified and renewed, and we’ll finally be able to overturn this insane law that allows people to protect themselves.