On 6/14/18, HR 6105 was introduced by Rep. Don Bacon of Nebraska, and co-sponsored by Rep. Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Rep. John Rutherford of Florida. It now goes to the House Judiciary Committee. I encourage all who may have signed this petition to contact your local representatives and urge them to support this important legislation. I will once again contact my representative, who has avoided this issue despite my reaching out. I do think there needs to be a few minor adjustments to the bill as proposed, but I'm thankful someone finally took some action. I suspect it was totally independent of this petition, but the important thing is someone in Congress finally sees the light. My comments that will be passed along: I have been made aware that you sponsored a bill recently to amend certain provisions of LEOSA. As a retired officer who has spent time over the past two years trying to get many of the same changes enacted, I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that you have taken these steps. My efforts, which started on Change.org, garnered many signatures but I couldn’t get a single elected official to show any interest in even discussing the matter. First, I would like to offer my support in any way possible to make this legislation become a reality. I have included links to my proposal, and as you can see there is a real need to encourage our officers to carry their weapons with them. The way LEOSA is currently written it actually puts several roadblocks in the way that often forces officers to leave their weapons at home, which is contrary to the purposes of LEOSA. I would like to suggest a few changes to your proposal though. As written, your proposal could be interpreted to allow officers to carry on airplanes and some restricted areas of airports. While that may be a good idea, I would suggest that in order to carry in those areas an officer would have to attend the same FAA training that is currently required for officers flying armed. It is not that much of an extra burden and given the highly secure and confined spaces of air travel the additional training would be a reasonable requirement. The other concern I have is there are inconsistencies between the various states regarding the standards to be followed in qualifying officers to carry under LEOSA. It shouldn’t be that difficult to come up with one single standard that could be uniformly applied, which would add to the professionalism of all who carry under this act.