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NC op-ed tries to distort reality on gun permits

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North Carolina is the only state in the South with gun permits. By that, I mean permit-to-purchase requirements for handguns. You simply cannot lawfully buy a handgun in the state without one, even for a private purchase.

And that’s a big problem.

After all, this is a constitutionally-protected right we’re talking about here. Further, this is a Jim Crow-era law that deserves to be removed.

But some people like to distort reality to try and defend such laws.

Who are we to believe?

North Carolina Republican legislators, who have a legacy of enacting laws that courts have declared racially biased and now say they’re looking to rid the state of a vestige of the racist Jim Crow era by repealing the state’s statutes requiring county sheriffs to issue pistol permits after background checks from applicants.

Or …

Organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) – North Carolinians who know and lived Jim Crow first-hand – or the Duke University Center for Firearms Law, who say “statements that North Carolina’s permit law was purely racist or solely intended to disarm Black citizens don’t hold up to close historical scrutiny and often do a disservice to the quality of debate and discussion surrounding modern legislative proposals like the current push to repeal the law.”

First, how many current members active with the NAACP actually lived during the Civil rights Era? I’m genuinely curious how many of the leaders denying the Jim Crow roots of gun permits in the state actually remember what it was like during that time in North Carolina’s history.

Further, the Duke University Center for Firearms Law is a glorified gun control think-tank. They’re not historians, and the center has repeatedly found fault with decisions overturning various gun control laws on Second Amendment grounds.

So I’m sorry, their claims aren’t definitive by any stretch of the imagination.

Take a look at the requirements for just a second and you’ll see the “good moral character” requirement. That’s the very clause used to keep numerous black people from owning guns for years. They couldn’t lawfully say to exclude black men and women, but they used it for that purpose just the same.

Further, all it takes is one racist sheriff to do it all over again. In a world where people such as many NAACP members claim systemic racism, do you really want to trust that?

Of course, some will invariably claim that such laws keep North Carolinians safe, and that gun permit requirements make it harder for bad people to get guns.

Yet North Carolina’s violent crime rate is above the median average with a permitting requirement. If that’s the benefit of gun permits, then just what the hell is wrong with North Carolinians? After all, their violent crime rate appears to be higher than in my native Georgia that has no gun permit requirement for purchasing firearms.

So if the gun permits keep people safe, what are these folks trying to say about North Carolina in the first place? I ask because it sure looks like it’s not working.

Michigan school system has bold plan to address shootings

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I sincerely wish I could just snap my fingers and end mass shootings forever. Unfortunately, I can’t. No one can, and that’s also essentially what the push for gun control is with regard to mass shootings. At best, it’s a wish.

But a school system in Michigan has an interesting–and expensive–plan to address school shootings. They’re redesigning their schools.

Many schools in America, like the one Moreno’s grandson attends, have installed metal detectors and fortified their entrances in response to the threat of school shootings.

But others, like Fruitport High School in Michigan, have opted to completely redesign their buildings’ architecture – spending $48 million to incorporate curved hallways and little nooks for students to hide in, among other safety-driven upgrades.

“Architectural designs will be very important. And hopefully they will focus on really getting better security for schools and students and children,” Moreno said, hoping districts “really know and take into consideration the pain in people’s lives right now.”

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Over the past five decades, schools have taken various approaches to improve safety, said Gregory Saville, who edited the International Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design Association, or CPTED’s, guidebook on school design.

“Schools simply were these boxes, the red stone buildings of, you know, ‘Ozzie and Harriet’ back in the forties and sixties,” Saville said. “They simply had teachers [and principals] watching… But that was it.”

Around the same time CPTED was created, that started to change, and schools began installing cameras and trimming hedges to improve sight lines. Saville said that was part of a larger architecture and urban planning movement, looking at ways to reduce crime in physical environments.

But now, instead of calling for fortified entrances and security features that can put students on edge, experts are calling for a more holistic approach – where architecture serves as a conduit for both physical security and for supporting students’ mental health to prevent violence in the first place.

“They have these hallways and lockers, but there’s no place to hang out, no place to socialize,” said architect Rene Berndt, who is part of CPTED’s board of directors. “And so, we’re trying our best to create these moments, to use these areas to create some kind of social cohesion, to actually avoid the whole concept of some students being pushed so far out and so alienated, you know, that [they don’t] really have a place to belong.”

Now, I’m not sure if it will work or not, but I applaud the thinking behind it.

See, this isn’t some school board putting out a call for gun control. They’re looking at ways to eliminate their schools as potential targets in the first place, plus potentially addressing the causes of school shootings at the same time.

It’s a bold and noble effort.

Again, I don’t know that it will work, but what we’re seeing here is an effort to at least try something.

Removing long, straight hallways also reduces the ability of a school shooter to find targets. Alcoves to hide in may help preserve individual lives should one try it. Further, since things wind, once the killer is out of sight, the hidden student can then escape.

And if it keeps students from feeling that alienated, well, isn’t that even better?

Now, I’ve been a proponent of hardening our schools, and I still think we should to some degree, but I also like outside-of-the-box thinking on how to address these shootings. That’s what we see here.

The downside is, of course, the price tag. It’s expensive as hell and a lot of school systems aren’t going to be up for that kind of thing. Further, grants for metal detectors are much easier to find than ones that fund a total redesign of a school’s architecture.

Still, I wish them luck and I hope to hell it works.

Unfortunately, it’s one of those things that if it works, we’ll likely never think about it again. That’s kind of a shame.

Op-ed exposes gun control advocate’s myopic thinking

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The topic of gun control is one that we’re never going to get past, I’m afraid. For every right we have, there will be someone who wants to take it away.

It’ll always be for what they think are good reasons, of course. It’ll also be described as something like a minimal restriction or whatever. They’ll claim they don’t want all of that particular right, just that one little piece of it.

But underlying all of this is some really bizarre thinking, particularly when it comes to gun control.

Take this op-ed about the issue of passing gun control in Virginia right now.

Young children and teenagers in Virginia have proved they can get their hands on guns and harm themselves and others. The firearms might have been right in their own homes.

Against this backdrop, lawmakers in the General Assembly passed almost no new gun legislation this year to stem the ongoing carnage. It was as if the blood-soaked status quo was acceptable.

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In Virginia, you can blame philosophical differences among the parties for a lack of progress in the Assembly, as the Richmond Times-Dispatch noted. Democrats, who control the state Senate, tend to focus on preventing violence and seeking holistic solutions. Republicans, who control the House of Delegates, often prefer boosting prison terms for specific crimes.

I favor the former approach because it focuses, in part, on the underlying reasons why people choose guns to settle disputes. Intervention can prevent foolish and fatal decision-making.

Now, I’d like to give the author a bit of credit for not blatantly straw-manning the GOP position on preventing violence. He’s wrong, but at least it looks like an attempt to give a good-faith accounting of both sides of the issue.

Pro-gun voices don’t support gun control, though, not because they think prison terms are better–for the record, they’re really not. Most violent offenders either don’t think they’re going to get caught or don’t care, so there’s no deterrence factor–but because they believe gun control simply doesn’t work.

And, particularly if you talk about violence as a whole, it doesn’t.

At best, gun control laws would make it so violent criminals would stab people to death rather than shoot them. Um…how is that better?

We already know our knife homicide rate is higher than many other nations’ total homicide rate, so we can’t even pretend that the problem is purely one about guns. Yet gun control really looks like the warped belief that it’s somehow better to be stabbed 27 times than be shot once.

The author favors removing guns because he feels it “focuses, in part, on the underlying reasons why people choose guns to settle disputes,” but ignores the fact that if one is inclined to settle disputes violently in the first place, it won’t matter if guns are available or not, they’ll still respond violently.

That means things like stabbings and beatings, all of which are also potentially fatal.

Removing guns from the equation–not that gun control will, mind you, but roll with me for the sake of argument–doesn’t end the potentially fatal outcomes. It simply shifts to other weapons that are arguably more brutal and terrifying.

The author’s belief is myopic at best.

Yet he’s not alone in somehow thinking that gun control will make the problem go away. That’s why the problem is always framed around guns themselves. “If we remove guns, gun violence disappears” sounds very common sense until you realize that you haven’t made anyone less violent. What you’ve done is put the physically weak at the mercy of bigger, stronger, and meaner people.

That’s not a world I want to live in.

Anti-gunner wants to rewrite Second Amendment

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The right to keep and bear arms is enshrined in the Second Amendment. We’re not the only nation that has such a provision in our constitution–Mexico, surprisingly, has a provision that’s supposed to be similar to it, though it clearly doesn’t work–but we’re the only nation that seemingly tries to respect it.

Yet that’s a problem for some.

Take an op-ed writer at the Washington Post. He doesn’t like how Bruen interpreted the Second Amendment.

Two and a half months into 2023, there have been more than 110 mass shootings in the United States and more than 8,700 overall gun deaths, according to the Gun Violence Archive. Rather than that creating a sense of emergency in our nation’s legislatures and courts, we’re seeing quite the opposite: the most extraordinary court-driven rollback of laws meant to reduce gun violence we’ve seen.

Last year, the Supreme Court handed down its ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, in which Justice Clarence Thomas declared that for any contemporary gun regulation to be constitutional, the government would have to identify a “historical analogue” to it from the nation’s founding. The result has been a transformation in U.S. gun laws that is producing far more chaos than expected, and leading to outcomes far more divorced from the public will than anyone predicted.

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In the broadest terms, says Blocher, “the pre-Bruen settlements actually did reflect where most Americans are on guns.” Clear majorities support universal background checks, “red flag” laws that allow guns to be taken from people who pose a danger to others, and licensing requirements to own a handgun.

But any or all such measures could now potentially be declared unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has effectively rewritten the Second Amendment in ways that the vast majority of Americans, even gun owners, disagree with.

But if we’re going to rewrite the Second Amendment, we should do it through the normal constitutional process, and establish one that works for the contemporary world.

In other words, he wants to rewrite it so that it means absolutely nothing.

An actual rewrite of the Second Amendment that allowed gun control to any degree is a version of the Second Amendment that will allow any and all desired gun controls one wants to imagine, possibly short of a total gun ban.

The thing is, most nations lack total bans. Usually, someone can get a firearm. The question is just how restrictive are the laws and do they prohibit anyone but the elite from getting them. However, a total ban isn’t really where gun control is likely to go.

Instead, what we’ll see is a functional ban, a set of rules so restrictive that a ban might as well be in place. Take machine guns. Sure, you can buy them, but the rules surrounding them put them out of the reach of most people.

So yeah, any attempt to rewrite the Second Amendment would essentially make the right to keep and bear arms meaningless in this country.

That’s likely the plan, though.

Further, let’s also remember that Bruen never rewrote anything. It simply went a lot closer to that whole “shall not be infringed” thing than the author would like. So no, we won’t be rewriting a damn thing.

Justice Department asks SCOTUS to uphold gun restriction

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There’s almost no chance we will ever see our nation completely without gun restrictions. Sure, the Second Amendment doesn’t allow for exceptions, but I just don’t see there being enough will by anyone, including the Supreme Court, to open the doors, so to speak, and end any and all restrictions on who can buy guns.

But Bruen took a big step forward, though, by laying down some groundwork on standards laws have to clear.

As a result, a lot of laws got overturned. Now, the Justice Department is asking the Supreme Court to reinstate one of them.

The Justice Department has asked the Supreme Court to allow a federal law stand that makes it a crime for people under domestic violence restraining orders to own firearms.

In February, a three judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans declared that the ban was unconstitutional, saying it violated the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which protects the right to bear arms. It was the latest victory for gun rights advocates since a Supreme Court ruling last June granting a broad right for people to carry firearms outside the home.

The Supreme Court ruling announced a new test for assessing firearms laws, saying restrictions must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation,” and not simply advance an important government interest.

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“More than a million acts of domestic violence occur in the United States every year, and the presence of a firearm increases the chance that violence will escalate to homicide,” the petition reads.

Now, I’m just going to point out that if we look at the average man versus the average woman, a gun isn’t necessary for that violence to escalate to homicide.

For me, the solution to that is relatively easy and should even be politically expedient. Just elevate domestic violence crimes to the level of a felony.

Then there’s little doubt that the abuser should be restricted from owning firearms and even less chance that the Bruen decision would impact laws keeping them disarmed.

If the crimes don’t warrant felony charges then, in my estimation, they don’t warrant restricting someone’s civil liberties.

That’s not me being an apologist for wife beaters, either. I think they’re absolute scum. I want them facing felony charges, regardless of any Second Amendment issues.

But the problem with this restriction is that it’s part of an incremental effort that will eventually lead to only a select few actually being able to own guns. It started here, then people began trying to keep people with DUI convictions from being able to own guns.

That effort can and will continue unless it’s stopped permanently.

Which brings us back to this case.

The Justice Department wants the law to be upheld, and that may or may not happen. I can’t really tell where the Court will land on this one just yet. However, I do believe that this will provide the Court an opportunity to provide a hard line that cannot be crossed. If they uphold the current law, they’ll likely say just how far this kind of thing can go.

If not, well, then we have a hard line as well.