By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
Quite possibly the biggest gun rights story of 2023 was the advancement of permitless—also called “constitutional”—carry to now cover 27 of the 50 states, creating a majority situation, as noted by Fox News, which makes the gun prohibition lobby furious.
On their website, Brady United declares, “This decision is dangerous and an unprecedented change to centuries of practice and regulation. Lower courts now have more power to strike down gun laws, due to the Supreme Court’s ruling that history and tradition should be the sole factors in determining whether or not a law is consistent with the Second Amendment. This test could lock the United States into the past, at a time when people of color, women, and others were not allowed to participate in the political process and when assault weapons were not yet in existence.”
Translation: Permitless carry is somehow tantamount to racism and sexism.
Another argument from the Brady camp is that “constitutional carry” leads to more crime committed by people who carry guns without getting a permit or license. The argument ignores the fact that criminals have been doing exactly that for generations, because criminals do not bother with such things as carry permits, background checks, waiting periods or any other roadblocks anti-gunners have put in the way of law-abiding citizens.
One Op-Ed writer in Florida asserted last month that permitless carry is unconstitutional.
This year, the states of Georgia, Florida and Nebraska—all with Republican governors and GOP-controlled legislatures—joined the ranks of constitutional carry states. For the gun prohibition lobby it was a major defeat.
When the U.S. Constitution was ratified, there were no carry permits or licenses. It was actually commonplace for citizens to be armed, or have guns close at hand. As noted by the Fox News article, nobody needed to ask the government for permission to have a gun, or carry one.
Today, these states have permitless carry: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia and Wyoming. Among them, Vermont is the one state which has always had permitless carry, and when the movement to do away with licenses and permits first began several years ago, gun rights activists routinely referred to “Vermont-style carry” as their goal.
Throughout the debates, arguments against permitless carry were virtually always the same. Opponents insisted such laws would lead to increased bloodshed, essentially as they had when opposing the spread of “shall-issue” concealed carry laws a generation ago.
One interesting offshoot of permitless carry in Florida was the report at WLRN, produced as a project of the Florida Atlantic University School of Communications, revealing that increasing numbers of Jewish citizens have obtained firearms in the wake of the Hamas attack in Israel and an increase in antisemitic incidents over the past couple of months.
