A decade
Sing along:
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday to you
Happy Birthday Dear CCW in North Carolina
Happy Birthday to you:
North Carolina’s concealed handgun law, which becomes 10 years old next month, has worked well. Even gun-control advocates concede that point.Now one gun-rights group – Grass Roots North Carolina – hopes the law will be expanded so that people with concealed handgun permits will have fewer restrictions on where they can carry their weapons.
November 18th, 2005 at 5:35 pm
K, ten years. When & how is the push for Vermont style CCW gonna come? I know – but I recall many pro-CCW groups saying that instead of pushing for Vermont style right off the bat, they had to get Shall Issue first. Except for Alaska I haven’t seen Step 2 coming to ruition, or even pushed for in a serious way.
As a buddy of mine said when the NC Shall Issue law went into effect & I asked if he was going to get one, “Why? I’ve been tucking a pistol in my pocket for 20 years & never had to have a permit before. It just slips right in there.”
November 18th, 2005 at 6:48 pm
Vermont-style carry is nice, and Alaska-style is better, but if I lived in NC my first order of business would be to push for Vermont–and-almost-everyone-else-style purchases.
November 18th, 2005 at 8:22 pm
Yeah, 10 years. I’m sure the streets will be awash with blood and bodies.
Any day now…
Its’ coming, you know…
Aww, the heck with it. Why can’t we all just get along gun?
November 19th, 2005 at 9:34 am
XRLQ is right: we still have some kind of wacky (I’ve heard Jim-Crow-era-relic) system where to buy a handgun you have to go down to your county sheriff and fill out a form to get a purchase permit. Then in a week you come back and (hopefully) get your permit.
I was told that not so long ago when you filled out the form, you used to have to take two people with you to swear that you were a decent human being or some such.
November 21st, 2005 at 5:58 pm
X is right – the pistol permit laws are atrocious. & they are a vestige of Jim Crow. & I’d support any push to repeal them.
That being said folks thought a shall issue ccw was more important than pushing that back, so likely they’ll think that pushing it back either isn’t desirable or feasible. Hence if they really like shall isue CCW they should be pushing for vermont style carry by now. This is mainly on the idea that folks push for CCW first as a stepping stone to vermont style – or at leat that’ what they say when someone like me brings up pushing vermont style instead of shall issue.
November 21st, 2005 at 9:10 pm
Instead of ‘Vermont-style’ carry, why not call it ‘Constitutional Carry’? Kudos to Vermont for actually deciding the Bill of Rights means what it says.
We’re arguing statistics and success stories with people who are irrational. We’re dealing with politicians who depend on ‘Nanny State’ thinking for expansion of their power base. We are championing self sufficiency and freedom to people who don’t want to feel responsible for themselves – and don’t want us to be, either, as it highlights their own shortcomings.
Its’ a long hard road – it took NC 130 years to go from ‘Jim Crow’ to CCW. We’re halfway there, lets keep our eyes on the ball.
November 22nd, 2005 at 1:05 pm
Could be – or maybe they just figured that the permit process was a minor headache, as those permits are almost always granted anyway, and shall-issue was a higher priority. I’d tend to agree; given the choice between pistol permit + shall issue (NC) and no pistol permit + may, and probably won’t issue (CA), I’d opt for the former over the latter.
If, on the other hand, NC residents thought abolishing the pistol permit requirement wasn’t politically feasible, I don’t see how Vermont-style carry could be.
I don’t buy shall-issue as a stepping stone to Vermont-style carry, but I do see it as a stepping stone toward the most favorable carry laws any given state is capable of. In Alaska, and maybe one or two others, it’s Vermont-plus (the plus representing the fact that you can still get a permit if you want one – an option that doesn’t exist in Vermont and which can cause trouble for Vermont residents while visiting other states). In most states, or all so far, the best you can hope for is that a so-so shall-issue law will lead to a better shall-issue law. There are plenty of examples of the latter, Texas being among the most prominent (recall Algore dissing GWB for signing a CHL bill that allows people to pack heat in church, which Texas’s original CHL law did not allow).
MarkF:
The Bill of Rights doesn’t say anything about concealed carry. Arguing a Second Amendment right to carry in any manner you want is a bit like asserting a First Amendment right to swear on the radio (which you don’t have), as opposed to a First Amendment right to express your views on the radio (which you do have, assuming you can get on the radio in the first place).
November 23rd, 2005 at 7:46 am
X,
The Bill of Rights does not exclude concealed carry from the bearing of arms, therefore it’s reasonable to conclude that since it was not excepted it must be included.
But a more apt anaolgy would be saying that since the first amendment doesn’t mention whispering then you have no right to anonymously express a view to just yourself (or perhaps one or two others very close to you), whereas proclaiming it loud enough for others to hear is protected speech.
The ‘swearing” analogy would be more appropriate in regards to specific types of arms which may fall under the 2nd’s scope. Besides, you can swear on the radio – you are merely fined for saying certain swear words (but not all swear words). & radio is a bad analogy as it’s a private medium (despite the heavy government regulation) whereas most folks seek to carry only on their own property & in public places.
All that aside, NC politics are strange. Not as strange as Co or Cali’s, but I can see folks thinking that permitless carry (the constitutional option) would be okay & at the same time figuring that pistol permits for purchase were okay (since they’re required for all transactions – public & private). The reasoning would be that it’d be better to control who gets hold of a pistol rather than fretting about the way they carry it. Course this would assume that the permit to purchase would keep undesirables (i.e. murderers, robbers, etc) from getting hold of pistols which we both know is not the case.
& I don’t really buy the Shall issue as a stepping stone argument either. But my point was that most folks who push for shall issue & are questioned as to why they don’t push for the Vermont style CCW laws usually claim that shall issue is a necssary step towards that.
November 23rd, 2005 at 1:15 pm
We’ve discussed this before – it goes to the now-archaic (but then-current) meaning of “infringe,” which essentially means “destroy,” not “step on your toes just a little bit.” A law prohibiting (or regulating to a prohibitive level) both open and concealed carry clearly infringes the right to “bear” arms, but a policy that permits either would not.
That analogy works, too, or on the flip side you could refer to a law that prohibits shouting. The point is that laws that merely regulate the manner in which a right may be exercised have to be viewed differently from those that deny that right altogether. This is not to suggest that a law against shouting couldn’t be struck down under the First Amendment, nor that a law against carrying a gun in a particular manner couldn’t be struck down under the Second (assuming courts ever figure out that there is one), only that neither is a slam dunk.
Nah, the analogy works because if you get fined it’s by the FCC for violating federal regulations. It’s not up to the owner of the station (or the transmitter, or anything else) to allow or not allow certain swear words to be uttered. If the owner of the station swears on his own property, he gets the same fine as anyone else. In that sense radio regulation is far stricter than guns. Even Kalifornia allows Vermont-style carry on your own property (assuming you can afford any).