Update: The combined bill explained below passed the House this afternoon on a vote of 231-198. Six Democrats voted for it. Fourteen Republicans voted against it. The legislation now moves to the Senate where it most probably will face a filibuster unless Republicans can persuade eight Democrats to vote yes.
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Last week, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill which would force each state to recognize as valid permits from residents of other states to carry concealed, loaded firearms across state lines. This would apply even when the concealed-carry laws in those other states are much weaker. Republicans hope that by combining this bill with a bipartisan bill to improve the federal background-check system, they can collect enough votes to get both passed in the Senate. But some Democrats say combining the two will kill them both.
The reciprocity bill was introduced by Republican Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, has 210 Republican and three Democratic co-sponsors, and is slated for a floor vote today. He said the combining of the two bills wasn’t his idea. Here’s The New York Times editorial board trashing Hudson’s bill:
The measure fits well with the fantasies of vigilante justice peddled by President Trump in last year’s campaign and enthusiastically embraced by the N.R.A. Mr. Trump, who once favored strong gun controls, reduced the mass shooting epidemic to a Marvel comics scenario in which justice is done and deliverance achieved by heroic gunplay. “If I’m in that room, and let’s say we have two or five or 40 people with guns,” he hypothesized to voters, “we’re going to do a lot better because there’s going to be a shootout.”
Genuine self-defense episodes, however, are scarce. Deaths caused by concealed-carry gun owners are not. Research shows that far from stopping mayhem, concealed-carry gun owners have been doing more harm to themselves, their family members and other innocent victims. Since May 2007, they have been responsible for at least 1,119 deaths not involving self-defense, including in 31 mass shootings and the killing of 21 law enforcement officers, according to the Violence Policy Center, a gun safety group.
You can get a fuller picture about the dangers of the reciprocity bill here. The measure has been on the National Rifle Association’s wish list in some form for several years. But there is worse to come already in the pipeline.
Back in 1986, soon after the gun lobby began its campaign to make it easier for Americans everywhere to carry concealed firearms, the majority of states issued permits for this purpose in very small numbers, if at all. Since then, all the states have made it at least somewhat easier to get a permit.
So what’s worse than lots of permits? As you can see from the two maps below showing the situation in 1986 and now, another NRA campaign has been gaining ground—concealed carry without a permit.
In 2001, only one state—Vermont—maintained this arrangement. Since colonial days, anybody in Vermont could carry concealed without getting permission, and unlike other states, it never tightened the law. Alaska became the second no-permit-needed state in 2003. Then, in 2013, the NRA began quietly working in the legislatures on this. Consequently, a dozen states do not now require concealed-carry permits.
And while some state legislatures have rejected no-permit bills, or, as in Montana, passed bills that a Democratic governor has vetoed, the gun lobby is relentless. Thus, we can expect more states to join the parade over the next few years.
So, what happens when no-permit-needed meets reciprocity? Will residents of Missouri or Arizona, where no permit is required, be allowed to carry their hidden firearms in California where concealed permits in the mostly heavily populated counties are still issued parsimoniously? That’s the way critics interpret Hudson’s bill. This terrible legislation needs to be flat-lined by the Senate.