HB 189

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GRNC Feedback Day

May 6, 2024 by

Grass Roots North Carolina has declared Tuesday, May 7th, as Feedback Day. In an effort to get HB 189 for permitless concealed carry back on the agenda, they are urging everyone to call NC House Speaker Tim Moore and NC Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger. You are asked to thank them for ridding the state of the Jim Crow-era pistol purchase permit and then urge them to get HB 189 back on track.

I would add that if you live and vote in the 14th Congressional District of North Carolina please remind Tim Moore that he needs your vote if he wants to be elected to Congress.

The alert is below with phone numbers and instructions.

‘FEEDBACK DAY’ ON
CONSTITUTIONAL CARRY
GRNC ‘Feedback Day’ will drop calls into leaders’ offices

 Should you need governmental permission to exercise a basic civil right? 

Last week, legislative team volunteers led by GRNC President Paul Valone delivered a hand truck full of petitions calling for constitutional carry to Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, arguably the most powerful politician in the state, and then held a press conference on his doorstep. That is called “speaking truth to power.”

The effort kicked off GRNC’s renewed campaign to pass House Bill 189, “Freedom to Carry NC,” sponsored by Rep. Keith Kidwell (R- Beaufort, Dare, Hyde, Pamlico, GRNC ****). The bill stalled last year when Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger told reporters that, having repealed the pistol purchase permit law, legislators had no “need” to address another gun bill. GRNC President Paul Valone has countered that ours is a Bill of Rights, not “needs,” and that Sen. Berger is not a self-appointed arbiter of “needs.” 

When Berger conceded later to reporters that “Constitutional carry is something that is worth talking about. We’ll talk with our members and see whether there is an appetite to move forward with it,” Valone responded: “We’re the ‘members’ who gave you a supermajority, Sen. Berger, so let’s talk.”

GRNC in action: For a video of GRNC’s Legislative Action Team holding a constitutional carry press conference on Berger’s doorstep CLICK HERE.  
IMMEDIATE ACTION REQUIRED!
It’s time to make your voice heard loud and clear in the halls of the legislature by sending a message to Republican leaders in Raleigh. We would like you to call during a two-hour period from 9:00 AM EDT to 11:00 AM EDT this coming Tuesday, May 7.

Why Tuesday? Because NC Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger and NC House Speaker Tim Moore are more likely to be in their offices. Legislative assistants will prevent you from speaking with them, of course, but they will witness the huge number of resulting calls, all calling for constitutional carry. Set a reminder in your phone. 

CALL SEN. PHIL BERGER: Between 9 AM and 11 AM on Tuesday, May 7, call Sen. Berger at 919-733-5708. (See below, under ‘Deliver This Message’ for the message to convey). 


CALL SPEAKER TIM MOORE: Also between 9 AM and 11 AM on Tuesday, May 7, call Speaker Tim Moore at 919-733-3451. (See below, under ‘Deliver This Message’ for the message to convey). 


PLEASE CONTRIBUTE TO GRNC: Help us fight fun control while we promote Second Amendment principles. Please CLICK HERE to contribute. Bear in mind that GRNC is an all-volunteer organization, so you can be sure your donations are put to the best possible use. Any amount helps, and any amount is appreciated.   
DELIVER THIS MESSAGE

What to tell Republican leaders:     

Thank them for repealing our Jim Crow purchase permit law, but tell them the job won’t be done until the Republican supermajority passes constitutional carry, including over-riding Gov. Roy Cooper’s inevitable veto.

NC Republicans have fallen behind Republicans in the 29 other states that have already passed constitutional carry.

Research by John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center found no increase in violent crime in constitutional carry states, and even a slight drop in murder.

Gun voters helped create the supermajority Republicans have used to pass several laws, over-riding Cooper’s vetoes. It is time they acknowledged that by passing House Bill 189, “Freedom to Carry NC” NOW!

Excuses like legislative rules and placing blame on one chamber or the other are just that: Excuses. 
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Asheville Gun Show!

July 7, 2023 by

If you live in western North Carolina or are visiting the area this weekend, stop by the Asheville Gun Show. It is being held Saturday and Sunday in the Davis Event Center at the WNC Ag Center. For those attending from out of town, it is at the corner of Fanning Bridge Road and Airport Road in Fletcher just across from the Asheville Regional Airport.

It open at 9am on Saturday and runs until 5pm. On Sunday, it opens at 10am and runs until 4pm. If you got to the promoter’s website, you can get a coupon for $1 off the $10 admission. With 400 tables, it is one of the larger gun shows in the region.

If you do come to the show, stop by the Grass Roots North Carolina booth and say hello. I should be there most of the weekend. We will be in a new location that should give us more visibility.

More importantly, if you are not a member, take advantage of the gun show discount and join! We are still pushing hard on getting HB 189 – Freedom to Carry NC – through this session of the General Assembly. With enough pressure Tim Moore and Phil Berger plus the Republican supermajority in both houses, it is doable. More members means more pressure on those two.

I hope to see you there!

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A Juxtaposition

May 7, 2023 by 4 Comments

Checking my email this afternoon, I found links to two posts regarding the failure to pass HB 189, permitless concealed carry, in North Carolina.

The first is from the NRA-ILA and is a short post about the failure of the bill to meet the crossover deadline.

From NRA-ILA:

This week, HB 189, originally titled the ‘NC Constitutional Carry Act’, moved through several committees in the North Carolina House of Representatives. As drafted, this legislation would have removed unnecessary government permission slips to exercise your Second Amendment rights. ​Unfortunately, the bill was amended in committee to include a mandatory training and education requirement; as a result, the bill was no longer constitutional carry.

The bill title was changed to “Freedom to Carry Act,” but with the legislation facing other concerns, it was taken off of the floor calendar, and failed to meet the crossover deadline to pass the House of Representatives.​

Your NRA-ILA will continue to make it our mission for North Carolina to become a constitutional carry state, and bury any attempts to compromise on the issue.

If you’ve read my earlier posts, you know where I stand on this. I also find it ironic that the NRA says they will not “compromise” given their history of doing just that. Whoever wrote the above ought to ask Wayne about his compromise on 1986’s Firearm Owners Protection Act which may just have helped enrich his BFF.

Liberty Doll has a different take on it. Her videos have just that right amount of sarcasm mixed with cute rockabilly chick libertarian.

With Liberty Doll’s 263,000 followers on YouTube, I would wager she is much more effective in getting her (and gun rights activists in North Carolina’s) side of the story out than the NRA-ILA.

The sad thing in all of this is that the NRA could have been involved from the start and the bill could have passed the NC House. That would have involved working with GRNC and GOA cooperatively and openly in a joint effort to get the bill passed. As it is, the NRA was largely absent. They have one ILA lobbyist, D. J. Spiker, who has to cover North and South Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia. I don’t know whether it is a matter of finances or just mere disinterest combined with negligence but you need more than one person to cover one-tenth of the population of the United States.

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Grabbing The Credit

May 4, 2023 by 1 Comment

If you read my post from last night, you know that it was not Moms Demand Action, Giffords, Everytown, or North Carolinians Against Gun Violence (sic) who deserves the credit for killing the permitless concealed carry bill, HB 189, in the NC House yesterday. The credit really goes to the people in Fairfax.

Nonetheless, Becky and her minions at NCGV are claiming credit. Below is what they posted to Instagram.

In an email sent out at 1:34pm on May 4th, they said:

HUGE news! We did it: the Permitless Carry bill was WITHDRAWN from the NC House calendar last night! Our volunteers – YOU!! – sent hundreds of emails, phone banked, spread the word on social media, and showed up at the General Assembly to stop HB 189 — all in a few days!

This was not a foregone conclusion: the bill passed two legislative committees in two days, and had been scheduled for a vote last night. It was pulled at the very last minute. So for now, HB 189 is NOT advancing to a full House vote!
👀 We’ll keep watching to make sure this bill does not come back up for a House vote – but today, know that YOU stopped this bill in its tracks!!

Thank you for your support on stopping this dangerous bill – North Carolina is safer today because of you!

Becky Ceartas

Executive Director

North Carolinians Against Gun Violence Action Fund

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NRA May Have Killed Permitless Carry In NC

May 4, 2023 by 14 Comments

HB 189 – Freedom to Carry NC Act has been withdrawn from a vote by the full North Carolina House of Representatives and referred back to the House Rules Committee. The bill, formerly known as the NC Constitutional Carry Act, may be dead for this session unless Rep. Keith Kidwell (R-79) can add a fiscal note to the bill. It should be noted that Rep. Kidwell is the Deputy Majority Whip. As noted earlier, the crossover deadline for passage of a bill without a fiscal note is tomorrow, May 4th.

So who is at fault and what happened?

You have your choice.

You can blame Speaker Tim Moore who requested a training component be part of the bill, you can blame the NRA who has now come out in opposition to the bill at the last moment because it includes a training component, or Sen. President Pro Tem Phil Berger who says they’ve done enough on gun rights.

Given the NRA had a chance to testify either for or against the bill during the Judiciary 2 Committee hearing and did not, I think the blame rests more at their feet than that of Speaker Moore. I think Speaker Moore anticipated the opposition from some in law enforcement as well as from the anti-gun lobby and wanted to negate the rationale for their opposition to the bill. As for Sen. Berger, this is not the first time he’s decided to kill attempts at permitless carry. He did it in the 2017-2018 session after it had passed the House because he was afraid of losing his super-majority which he lost anyway.

From the Raleigh News and Observer:

Grass Roots North Carolina, a gun rights group that was one of the bill’s chief supporters, had strongly urged GOP leaders to take it up this week. The group’s president, Paul Valone, said he would continue to work on trying to get the bill passed this session.

Valone indicated that the National Rifle Association had concerns about education requirements that had been added to the bill on Tuesday while it was considered by a House committee.

“We are disappointed that the NRA, which has been largely absent in this session of the General Assembly, swooped in at the last minute and declared the bill unacceptable, due to the training provision we had added,” Valone said. “We are continuing to work on the bill, it is still alive, and we are by no means done.”

D.J. Spiker, the NRA’s North Carolina state director, said in response that the NRA “will never apologize for refusing to compromise on an issue as critical as Constitutional Carry.”

Sen. Berger said as the bill was being removed from the calendar that he thought the Republicans had done enough when they finally got rid of the pistol purchase permit. He also said he didn’t think the timing was right.

From an interview with Michael Hyland of WNCN Channel 17:

“We have passed a substantial bill dealing with some concerns about (the) Second Amendment. We’ve done away with the pistol purchase permit, which was the No. 1 goal of many of the gun rights groups for a long period of time,” Senate leader Phil Berger told reporters. “I just don’t know if if there’s a need for us to delve into additional issues dealing with guns and people’s Second Amendment rights.”

In my estimation, if the NRA had been willing to join with GRNC and GOA in support of the bill, flawed or not, then it would have passed and the NC Senate would have taken up the bill either in 2023 or 2024. As for the NRA’s rationale for opposing the bill of not being willing to compromise their principles, that is a joke. One of the things the NRA always seems willing to do is compromise even when it is not warranted.

I speculate that there was an element of retribution in the NRA’s 11th hour opposition to HB 189. The bill, like the repeal of the pistol purchase permit, was closely identified with Grass Roots North Carolina and not the NRA. The NRA got really pissy when they were called out for taking credit for the repeal and dumping on GRNC for taking the rightful credit. When that is added to the “if it’s not invented here” syndrome which pervades the NRA, it became more important to screw GRNC (and gun rights supporters in North Carolina) than to pass the bill.

Was the bill as clean as one would have liked? Of course it wasn’t. However, in politics it is the art of the possible and not the perfect. Getting HB 189 passed in time to meet the crossover deadline was the critical issue. Once the bill was in the Senate, it could have been amended any number of ways to make it better. Now, unless a miracle happens, thanks to the NRA we wait another two damn years.

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Update On Permitless Concealed Carry In NC

May 3, 2023 by 1 Comment

The North Carolina House Judiciary 2 Committee held their hearing on HB 189 – NC Constitutional Carry Act today. The committee adopted a substitute which they often do and reported it favorably to the Rules Committee. The vote to advance the bill to Rules was 7 aye, 4 nay according to WGHP-TV Greensboro. The bill will be renamed “NC Permitless Carry”.

The House Rules Committee is scheduled to take up HB 189 tomorrow and a final vote is anticipated to come by Thursday, May 4th, which would meet the crossover deadline.

According to the WGHP report:

The bill was supported by gun rights advocacy groups, such as Grass Roots North Carolina and Gun Owners of America, represented by Andy Stevens, who said the bill would alleviate backlogs of some sheriffs who were slow to provide permits.

Paul Valone of Grass Roots North Carolina said the bill represented a “relatively modest bite at the apple.”

Among those speaking against the bill were the NC Council of Churches, NC Against Gun Violence, and the NC Sheriffs Association. The representative from the Sheriffs Association objected saying law enforcement would not know if the person they were approaching was legal to carry a concealed weapon. As with both the current law and the proposed law, anyone carrying concealed has the duty to inform if approached by law enforcement.

Grass Roots North Carolina also delivered over 1,500 signed petitions to Speaker Tim Moore’s office prior to the committee meeting. If you have not yet signed the petition, please do as that will increase the number that will be given to Sen. President Phil Berger.

Andy Stevens Photo

HB 189, in addition to allowing unlicensed carry, would reduce the permitted age to 18. It would also recognize training offered by US Concealed Carry Association. As I read Section 1.2 of the proposed law, the training requirement of the current law would be retained under permitless carry. The bill, however, makes no mention of providing proof of that training to law enforcement if questioned. It is reported that the retention of the training requirement was necessary to get permitless carry passed out of committee.

Another bill of relevance that passed out of the House Judiciary 2 Committee today was HB 691 – New Resident/Temporary Concealed Carry Permit. It would impact new North Carolina residents who have a current, unexpired carry permit from another state that is due to expire within 120 days of establishing residency. They would be granted a temporary permit so long as they had applied for a NC permit, paid the fee, had their fingerprints taken, and signed the mental health background check waiver. They would not be required to have taken a North Carolina training class before being granted the temporary permit. This permit expires when person gets their NCCHP or if the person does not provide proof of taking the North Carolina course within 120 days of getting the temporary permit.

HB 691 will go to the Rule Committee tomorrow along with HB 189.

UPDATE: You will note that the bill retains the training requirement. This so I understand came from the Speaker and was the compromise to have the bill move forward. It was either compromise to get something or wait another two years. It does negate the anti-gun lobby’s argument about “untrained” people being allowed to carry.

Additionally, the bill was not on the Rules Committee calendar when it was first published yesterday. However, checking the list as of this morning, both HB 189 and HB 691 are on their list of bills to be heard at 1:15pm today.