Dream On

Wouldn’t it be awesome if we had national constitutional carry? The ability to carry a firearm in all 50 states, no permit required? Of course it would!

Well, wait no more! Congressman Thomas Massie, ever the friend of gun owners and Second Amendment advocates throughout the country, has introduced HR 9534, the National Constitutional Carry Act! Say goodbye to mandatory concealed carry classes, permits, and other states telling you that you can’t carry here!

All we need now is 218 votes in the House of Representatives, and then 60 votes in the Senate. Of course, the bill will need 60 Senate votes in order to override President’s Biden’s certain veto. And even if the bill carries over into the next legislative year, we’ll have to override the veto of newly-inaugurated President Kamala Harris…thanks to all the gun rights purists who refused to vote for Donald Trump because he banned bump stocks and once talked like he supported red-flag laws (but never acted on it).

Unburdened by the Constitution.

But that should be no problem, right? There are currently 220 Republican members of the House, so as long as no more than two of them defect, it should cruise through that process…because if there’s one thing Congressional Republicans are good at, it’s sticking together, right? Right? And in the Senate, where we have 51 Republicans, we only need to get nine Democrats to go along, and we’re golden (again, as long as no Republicans go wobbly).

It’s always the fine print that gets you, right? Don’t you just hate hucksters who get you all psyched up with what looks like a great deal, but then you start reading into it, and then there’s all these restrictions and blackout dates, and…it’s not such a great deal after all.

Okay…I’ll get serious. This is a great bill. If it were to pass and withstand the scrutiny of the courts (now with Kamala Harris appointed judges, because you refused to vote for Trump), you could in fact travel all 50 states with your guns with no permit required (unless the permit were totally free). This bill would, in one fell swoop, for all practical purposes remove any barrier to national permitless carry.

But you know it isn’t going to pass the current Congress, and the current President would veto it anyway. You also know it is highly unlikely to pass any Congress in the foreseeable future, because it is also unlikely that the political makeup of Congress will change enough to give legislation like this the support it will need to become law. (Also because we have failed to properly prep the battlefield, but more on that in a minute.)

This bill is a dream, nothing more. It’s a dream being floated by Representative Massie to pander to his base, and to conceal the fact that he is a big reason that national constitutional carry will remain a dream for years to come.

You see, the right to bear arms freely across the United States was not infringed to this point all in one fell swoop, and it won’t be restored to the Founders’ intent in one fell swoop, either. Infringement was advanced incrementally, over time, and we have to embrace the same strategy to roll it back. To abuse a football analogy, we need some first downs. Chucking 70-yard Hail Marys at the end zone every snap is not a winning strategy.

“Go loooong!”

The growth of permitless carry in the states is a great example. Name one state that went from “may-issue” permitted carry directly to permitless carry all at once. You can’t, because it doesn’t exist. Of the 29 states which now have permitless carry, all (except Vermont) started out with may-issue permits, if they allowed concealed carry at all. But what happened next was that as more and more states eased restrictions on concealed carry, to greater and greater degrees over many years, it became demonstrable that widespread concealed carry had no significant effect on crime. Concealed carry became more normal and less scary, and barriers to responsible citizens carrying guns came tumbling down.

If we really want constitutional carry on a national basis, we have to approach it in the same fashion, and this is what irritates me about Massie so much. We had an opportunity in 2017 to do what the states did. If we had passed HR 38, the National Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, we would have made a step forward in demonstrating that responsibly armed citizens are no threat simply because they cross a state line. We could have gotten a first down. We could have moved the ball.

Then, after years of national reciprocity without “blood running in the streets,” we would have a much better case for removing the requirement of a permit altogether, as the Founders intended.

But as I have written before, Congressman Massie has actually opposed national concealed carry reciprocity, though not in the open and without revealing his rationale honestly. I may not have gone to MIT, but I am smart enough to understand that if we truly wish to restore the Second Amendment right to bear arms to its full meaning, Thomas Massie’s plan is only a dream.