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Here’s some news that has law enforcement officials and lawmakers scratching their heads:

Iowa is granting permits to acquire or carry guns in public to people who are legally or completely blind.

Polk County officials say they’ve issued weapons permits to at least three people who can’t legally drive and were unable to read the application forms or had difficulty doing so because of visual impairments.

And sheriffs in three other counties — Jasper, Kossuth and Delaware — say they have granted permits to residents who they believe have severe visual impairments.

“I’m not an expert in vision,” Delaware Sheriff John LeClere said. “At what point do vision problems have a detrimental effect to fire a firearm? If you see nothing but a blurry mass in front of you, then I would say you probably shouldn’t be shooting something.”

“Although people who are blind can participate fully in nearly all life’s experiences, there are some things, like the operation of a weapon, that may very well be an exception,” Patrick Clancy, superintendent of the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School, said.

It’s an issue that musician Stevie Wonder, who has been blind since birth, called attention to in January.

“Imagine me with a gun. It’s just crazy,” Wonder told CNN while calling for reforms to what he has previously called “ridiculous” gun laws. http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20130908/NEWS/309080061/?odys
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"Up until 2011, it was solely up to the sheriff of your county who decided who got a gun permit and who did not," Cedar County Sheriff Warren Wethington, who has been granting gun permits to the visually impaired since he became sheriff in 2007, told ABCNews.com. "So you were basically at the mercy of whether you had a pro-gun sheriff or an anti-gun sheriff."

In 2010, Iowa became a "shall-issue" state when the legislature amended a law to create a uniform procedure for issuing gun permits statewide.
"Once those restrictions were limited, we basically had to approve anybody who applied for a permit," said Delaware County Sheriff John LeClere. "Our opinion no longer matters and our information on an individual, as far as their character, was something we could no longer consider."

While applicants need to take a firearm safety course to obtain a permit, it is available online and does not need to include hands-on firearms training, which "makes it a little difficult," LeClere said.

"If we have a person who is possibly eyesight impaired, he is certainly entitled to defend himself," he said. "But should he be carrying [a firearm] in public?"

"I have some reservations about full access for people who are blind," said Patrick Clancy, superintendent of the Iowa Braille and Sight Saving School in Vinton, Iowa. "That's just because shooting requires a lot of vision to be accurate outside of controlled settings with safety courses."

"We don't believe there should be a blanket prohibition on blind people owning or carrying guns," said Chris Danielsen, spokesman for the National Federation of the Blind. "It's certainly true that the blind person or visually impaired person needs to be cautious about using a firearm, but so does everybody else."

Danielsen said the issue of whether or not to use a gun is primarily an issue of common sense, not sight. "The important thing for people to realize is that our judgment is not impaired," he said.

"A visually impaired person, in my opinion, is more entitled for a permit to carry, just for the sheer fact that they don't pick up on the cues that a sighted person would have," said Wethington.

Wethington said there is no reason why someone who is blind, if properly trained, can't operate or use a handgun or any weapon just as safely as any person who isn't visually impaired.

"I have a permit to carry. It doesn't restrict me in times of low vision. My permit is still good in heavy fog, it's good in low light, it's good anytime that my vision is obstructed," he said. "If I'm in a room that is low light or total darkness, my permit is still valid, even if I can't see better than a totally blind person."

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