There are a couple of places you’re guaranteed to find violence felons. One is in jail, and the other is in courthouses. However, many courthouses require citizens to be completely disarmed on the premises, leaving only law enforcement officers with the ability to protect anyone. Sometimes that works. Other times, not so much.

In the state of Iowa, the state supreme court has ordered an end to a firearm ban in county courthouses.

Local authorities are planning to weigh their options in response to the Iowa Supreme Court deciding to allow guns to be carried into county courthouses under certain restrictions.

The decision is a reversal of a complete ban on courthouse guns initiated last spring after lawmakers passed a sweeping gun rights bill.

Chief Justice Mark Cady issued an order last Tuesday revising the edict he’d written in June that banned guns from all courthouses in Iowa. The revised order allows county supervisors or other local government officials to file a written request to allow guns in the buildings.

When a request is made, the chief judge of the judicial district must write an order allowing guns in public areas that are not totally occupied by the court system.

Once a judge enters the order allowing guns, the state court system relinquishes to the requesting entity any authority over the regulation of weapons in the public areas, Cady’s order said.

It’s not perfect, but it’s a move in the right direction for the state.

Gun free zones may sound good in theory, but in practice, they do little to actually stop someone intent on killing others. What they do rather well is disarm the law-abiding. Luckily for most judges, the people they tend to encounter inside the courthouse are either law-abiding or already in handcuffs.

However, there’s another factor with gun free zones in courthouses that needs to be understood. What happens after someone steps out of the building? It wasn’t all that long ago when a judge needed to use his firearm in self-defense after being attacked just outside of a courthouse. While judges are often exempt from such rules, what about attorneys or even the average citizen? They also become vulnerable once leaving the courthouse.

Rule changes that minimize that risk are a good thing.

It’s a shame that we have so many people who are convinced that gun free zones are good things, but that’s the world we live in. However, cased like Iowa make it easier to retake our Second Amendment rights. Each expansion of where we are permitted to carry that fails to result in more bloodshed is more proof that the anti-gun zealots’ claims are nothing more than hysterics designed to scare people into siding with them but lacking in anything close to reality-based arguments.

Courthouses are no different. Not really. They’re only perceived as different. Yes, judges may be the target of violent actions, but that’s also true of plenty of other people. It doesn’t take much to anger some people enough that they want you dead, after all, so why should Iowa residents be disarmed just because they set foot inside a courthouse?