The fight over permitless carry in North Carolina is heating up, with a Senate committee slated to hold its first hearing on the measure on Tuesday.
Grassroots NC sent out an email to members on Monday alerting them to the meeting, which will take place at 11 a.m. Tuesday morning in the Senate Judiciary Committee. The organization is encouraging gun owners to turn out in person for the hearing, as well as contacting key members of the Republican majority to urge them to back SB 50.
Grasroots NC even provided a handy template for gun owners to use when contacting their lawmaker:
Dear Senator,
To date, 29 states have supported and passed the permit less (Constitutional) Carry law. Much research has been done on this issue, States with constitutional carry “Right To Carry” laws have been shown to lower violent gun crimes rates in these states. North Carolina can join in this data with our own permit-less carry law. With this law, gun owners will still have to meet the same criteria as law abiding citizens with carry permits, but without the need for a “permission slip” and the fee to exercise a constitutional right.
We are urging you to support this legislation and make North Carolina, the Great Old North State, part of the progressing constitutionally sound states respecting the integrity of their citizens’ right to carry peacefully and responsibly. The outlaws already have an abundance of weaponry at their disposal, we need to make sure our good law-abiding citizens have a way to protect themselves and their families.
As always, I will be monitoring your actions through the efforts of the Grass Roots NC legislative alerts and whether you stood with us on this important issue.
As you may also imagine, gun voters will come out to defend Republican supporters of SB50 who represent districts who have a marginal majority of support in November.
Thank you for your consideration regarding this very important legislation.
Respectfully,
Gun owners can simply cut-and-pate if they want, but I’d say a personal touch might make the email contact stand out a little more. Honestly, though, in most offices the staff is simply going to track how many contacts they get that are supportive or opposed to SB 50, with far more weight given to those missives that come from actual constituents.
SB 50 does enjoy the support (finally) of Senate President Pro Tem Phil Berger, and the bill is likely to garner a broad majority in both the House and Senate. The problem is that SB 50 is also guaranteed to be vetoed by Democrat Governor Josh Stein, who was a staunch ally of gun control groups when he served as the state’s attorney general.
Until this January the GOP had a veto-proof majority in both chambers, but now Republicans are one vote shy in the House of Representatives. That doesn’t automatically foreclose the possibility of permitless carry becoming law this session, but at the very least Second Amendment advocates are going to have to get every Republican on board in both the House and Senate.
North Carolinia is, at this point, the last state where permitless carry has a reasonable chance of getting enacted. The law is already in place in 29 other states, but in the other 20 Democrats have a pretty good grip on one or both chambers of the legislature. Getting 3/5ths of the country to recognize that our Second Amendment rights don’t come with a permission slip attached would be huge, and it is doable this year. It’s just going to take a lot of hard work and a little bit of luck for North Carolina gun owners to make it happen.
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