on the "Freedom to Carry NC".

first written 03.26.25 1804est

     I wrote this a bit ago and now its irrelevant. I  didn't publish then, posting now for posterity.

    The "Freedom to Carry NC" which has just passed through the senate and is soon to be heard by the house seeks to allow legal gun owners the ability to practice concealed carry without a permit.

    As per the current status quo, to obtain a concealed carry permit in NC you have to pay an $80 fee, attend a firearm safety and shooting class, and sign some forms. If this bill was passed NC's gun owners would not need to have any sort of training for firearms. Which is my main contention with this bill. 

    In the CDC's 2022 Gun Violence Report, North Carolina had the "12th highest gun homicide rate in the country" [2]. Gun Deaths in NC have been slowly increasing each year (though research has been harder find as time goes on after some attacks from GOP on the study of gun violence.). I do not feel particularly alarmist about gun violence in NC, especially because NC residents know its mostly my home of Nash County that is to blame. I won't force upon the Republican readers the tedious question of "how many gun deaths are too many"  because that framing is frivolous and bad faith. But I would like to raise that in a largely amicable and bipartisan friendly congress we should be pro active on these issues.

    I am personally pretty moderate on the matters of the 2nd amendment. Which is to say that I respect it as a right, but I am outcomes focused and if that requires choking the breadth of the 2nd amendment, I can live with that. So to do something like this that seems only to serve putting guns in the hands of the inept and ill-willed. I feel as though I am left with no other recourse but to label them all a bozo.

    The Senate Democrats as on their twitter account and as senator Mujtaba A. Mohammed articulated in the senate: the bill does pose a detriment to NC's police force. The argument goes that police officers will have one less data point when going into traffic stops and will have one less tool when prosecuting the bad guys.

footnotes

[1] https://www.ncleg.gov/Sessions/2025/Bills/Senate/PDF/S50v0.pdf

[2] https://publichealth.jhu.edu/sites/default/files/2024-10/v2-01.050-CGVS-State-Factsheets-NC.pdf