Name: Chris Will
Party: Libertarian
Running for: State House, Legislative District 26
Previous experience: Ran for Maricopa County Sheriff in 2008, state senate in 2010
State Press: Why are you running for office this year?
Chris Will: I just want to see a positive change in politics and see what I can do to help society in general. Everyone should try to run for office at least once in their life, and I want a better job.
SP: You were unemployed for several years before starting work at Walmart. How do you think that will impact you as a candidate and representative?
CW: I think it gives me a unique perspective on society and economy and a lot of the issues I’ll likely be voting on. In the past I’ve been a librarian, a freelance potter, worked for a couple of places before I started working for Chase. So I’ve got a broad background. I’ve watched the economy kind of implode while I worked at a bank – I was watching it from the inside and the outside, and there wasn’t really anything any of us could do. And then I was downsized, and I’ve been unemployed for a couple of years.
I’m very grateful for the $500 exemption. Have you ever heard of that? It’s such a great thing and hardly anyone has ever heard of it. All you need is to go to the election office at the county level or the Secretary of State, and for the most part you don’t have to pay anything to run for office. Basically you’re promising not to spend $500 in your campaign. I spent about $300 when I was running for Sheriff in 2008 and $39 in 2010.
It can be a little harder, but everyone should be knocking on doors to talk to their constituents anyways.
SP: How do you stand on the issue of guns on campus?
CW: I grew up in Arizona and I’ve been familiar with guns since I was about 5. If you have guns in the house, everyone in the house has to understand the potential there. I grew up understanding that you don’t point a gun at something you don’t want to kill. It makes people nervous.
On the one hand, you can say nobody carries a gun but everyone will be safe. That’s a great way to look at it, but there’s no way to enforce it. A lot of times the counter argument is if one of the good guys has a gun, everyone will be safer. There’s no right or wrong answer. It would be nice if we didn’t have to have anything to protect ourselves, whether it was a gun or a knife or a big stick.
SP: There have been a series of bills this last session dealing with reproductive issues. What would your stance be if these came up again?
CW: You can’t take away people’s right to make their own choice. Everyone has to decide for themselves what their actions are going to be at any given time. People are people, people are human, people make decisions based on good information and bad information and people lie. And if you make a decision based on somebody else’s lie, you’re going to be impacted in a negative way and sometimes that leads to unfortunate consequences and sometimes people make decisions because they’re happy or optimistic about something and it still doesn’t work out.
Everyone has to have their right to decide and everyone is different and you can’t take that away from them. I understand that people have religious convictions; I have them too, but you can’t stop people from making their own choices. People say killing is wrong, but people still murder other people.
I’m been very unpopular at times when men who I know have been relieved when their girlfriends have come and said “hey, I’m not pregnant” end up turning around and say abortion is wrong.
Men will never have to face this. They’ll never have to worry about making that decision. And they may talk about “what if it was my baby” but the only thing I’d say to that is you have to make sure you’ve been doing the right thing all along.
SP: What did you think of the recent SB 1070 ruling?
CW: I didn’t like 1070. People said there was nothing in this bill that wasn’t in law. Okay, than why are you passing it?
I really didn’t like how if you refuse to identidy yourself to an officer, you’re now committing a misdemeanor. If as far as I know I’m minding my own business, I should be able to say no. I’m minding my own business, you mind yours. We’ve also lowered the bar from probable cause to reasonable suspicion, and I don’t like that.
Also, you really can’t do anything to stop immigration, legal or illegal.
SP: Do you think some kind of legislative action should be taken with immigration?
CW: I know people who’ve had issues with how slow the immigration process is. They could have decided to stay until the papers were processed. We need to figure out how to deal with that better, but that’s federal.
I understand everyone’s frustration with this, both legal and the undocumented side. I don’t understand why it’s not an international scandal that people are dying in the desert everyday. And I don’t know why we’re not looking at why they’re coming here They’re coming here for the jobs and for the freedoms, and we’re doing a pretty good job of getting rid of some of those.
And building a wall didn’t work in Berlin, it didn’t work in China, it’s not going to work here. They’re just stopgaps, they’re temporary fixes. It just makes it harder for the rest of us anyway.
Don’t do it through the legislature. Do it through your church, your temple, any charities.
SP: How do you think legislators can work to keep education affordable?
CW: I’ll need to read that part of the constitution again, but it seems to me the Arizona constitution says school needs to be as free as possible. But I put the kids in high school, and the fees kept piling up. And when I tried to go back to school when I was unemployed, and the school I chose was not MCC or SCC or ASU, I tried to take some classes and they just pulled a bait-and-switch on me. I have some experience in credit and lending, but a lot of people don’t. I told them I couldn’t take out any loans, but they called everything financial aid. They said it could work, and then two weeks into the introductory course they came and said, “None of this worked, you have to do loans.” And then they tried to charge me for withdrawing.
I can so see how so many people, even with their parents’ help, get lost. Some of them are worded so you can’t even tell if what you’re signing is a loan. Having to mortgage your entire future without even a guarantee that you can pay it off is just wrong.
Reach the reporter at julia.shumway@asu.edu or follow @JMShumway on Twitter.
Like The State Press on Facebook and follow @statepress on Twitter.
