Anti-Gun Group’s Model Concealed Carry Policy Workable Only in Fantasy

The Bruen decision ended the idea of “may issue” permitting once and for all. The arbitrary decision process of who gets a permit and who doesn’t creates rights for some while excluding them for others, and that’s not how our civil liberties are supposed to work.

Anti-gunners hated the decision, of course, because they want to make the lawful carry of firearms untenable. If they can’t ban it outright, they want to make the process so onerous that many will simply decide that it’s just not worth it.

However, they don’t seem to grasp reality in the least, as is clear from what one anti-gun “think tank” seems to want with regard to concealed carry.

Enter the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions.

These egg-headed goons want to roll back the clock to the late 1980s. Their just-released “Public Carry Permitting: Model Policy Guide” is pretty much what some states offered decades ago. It’s laughable—a trip back in time. Nowadays, it’s likely too restrictive for even the bluest of blue states.

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The model policy recommendations are laughable.

It advocates for state permits that are obtained through a rigorous application process, which includes in-person visits with law enforcement, fees, fingerprinting requirements, a background check and even more. There are requirements for a written test and a live-fire qualification. The Center states that scores under 80% should fail the written test and 70% or lower fail the live-fire qualification.

The background check requirements are lengthy: “Background checks during the public carry permit application process should be comprehensive, including at least NICS indices, NCIC, III, and any available state and local public safety databases that may contain information on disqualifying prohibitions,” the policy states.

The authors believe permits should be denied for even non-violent misdemeanors discovered during the background check, including a DUI within five years.

Yeah, you read that last part right. They actually want to prevent people from getting a permit for a DUI.

While drinking and driving isn’t a good idea, it’s still not grounds to take someone’s rights away. It’s generally a misdemeanor. If DUI is that bad, why not try to make it a felony? At least then you’re being somewhat consistent in describing people with those as a danger.

They also want it to go back to “may issue,” I should note. Oh yeah, that’s in there, too, all despite Bruen.

Then, to top it off, they want permits to have to be renewed every five years, at which time, the individual would have to go through the written test and shooting qualification all over again.

Included in the report is a discussion of “hypotheses” as to why deregulation of concealed carry supposedly increases violence–something they don’t actually defend beyond simply stating this as fact, by the way–and it’s stupid. One of them, for example, is that if more people are carrying, then confrontations are more likely to turn violent.

We’ve heard that one for decades, but let’s look at what happened following Bruen for a moment.

The Bruen decision was the biggest deregulation we’ve ever seen in this country, as it impacted every anti-gun state and forced them to create objective criteria for concealed carry. More people carried guns. To follow this “logic,” then, we should have seen a ton of examples of these violent confrontations happen.

They didn’t.

Instead, we saw the biggest drop in the homicide rate over the last couple of years we’ve ever seen. While anti-gunners want to chalk this up to some return to historic norms, it still discredits the idea that more guns in the hands of lawful citizens somehow result in more violence.

Couple this with the fact that every study that’s bothered to look has found that concealed carriers are more law-abiding than any other group, including police officers, judges, and anti-gun former attorneys general in Virginia.

The truth is that the only place this model policy would actually happen is Fantasy Land. It can’t happen in the United States, if for no other reason than the Bruen decision nullifies the whole idea of reviving “may issue” permitting. Meanwhile, one of the authors of this comedic proposal has numerous anti-gun papers to his “credit,” which tells you all you need to know about how seriously this should be taken.

But we also know that some people will do just that.

Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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