No Respect
You know, national concealed carry reciprocity “don’t get no respect.” Donald Trump’s landslide is barely two weeks old, and some gun people are already doing what they do best…which is dumping all over an opportunity to possibly advance gun rights.
In case you haven’t seen it already, here is President-elect Trump promising to sign national concealed carry reciprocity legislation should it make it to his desk:
Sounds great, right? It does to me, for reasons I’ll get into. But there is a segment of the gun rights community that disagrees. I call them the “Spauldings.”
Just like petulant Spaulding from “Caddyshack,” they want it all. They want the NFA repealed, the GCA repealed, and the FOPA repealed. They want the ATF abolished, they want national constitutional carry…they want the 2nd Amendment restored to its full 1791 meaning. And they want it now.
So the Spauldings of the gun world are not happy with the promise of national concealed carry reciprocity. Not happy at all. Believe me, I have debated a few of them, and they simply will not be satisfied with anything less than a pure and unsullied…uninfringed, if you will…2nd Amendment. But the problem with stomping your feet and insisting on all or nothing is that the Judge Smails of the world will gladly tell you that, “you’ll get nothing and like it.”
I’ve written about this before, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on it. But a few thoughts:
The 2nd Amendment was not infringed upon all in one fell swoop. It won’t be restored that way, either. It was infringed upon largely through a couple of centuries’ worth of legislation and court decisions. Short of a violent revolution/civil war, that’s the only way we get it back…in Congress and in the courts. We won’t get there by insisting on “all or nothing.”
We get there just like we’ve been doing…by steadily pushing back the legal restrictions and showing the American people and their representatives that there is nothing to fear from peaceable citizens exercising their right to keep and bear arms. Over the last several decades we have gone from “shall issue” permitted carry being an outlier to being the norm. We have gone from permitless carry being practically unheard of, to being the law in a majority of states. Reciprocity between many of those states is also normal…but it is not yet nationwide.
This is where national concealed carry reciprocity has a role to to play. Not as the end goal, but as the gun banners like to say, “it’s a good first step.” Think of it as a demonstrator…that responsible citizens bearing arms throughout the 50 states will not result in Armageddon. The Overton Window can be moved in more than one direction, you know.
The people who railed against “shall issue” permitting 30 years ago are the same people who now insist on permits, when faced with the prospect of constitutional carry. But this is only because we first made permitting a widely established and accepted norm, and then moving to advance the idea of permitless carry. In the same way, a progression to national permitless carry is unlikely without nationwide reciprocity for permitted carry first.
So yeah, I get it. All gun laws are infringements, and no, we will probably never restore the 2nd Amendment to its full meaning. But we can make things a lot better, a little at a time. I’d love to see a day where I can carry my concealed defensive firearm in all 50 states without the need for a permit. But we will never make that jump without the interim step of national reciprocity for concealed carry permit holders. Pass it, and just as before, blood won’t run in the streets and it will become normal to carry nationwide. From there, just maybe national constitutional carry will become possible.
But insisting on all or nothing will get us nothing. So let’s show national concealed carry reciprocity a little respect.
