Here we go again. It happens every election when some politician somewhere based their campaign in part about "gun control" and then they feel it is their duty to pretend for a while that they are actually going to do something. Normally, this all fades away because even though NC is a "swing state" when it comes to most elections, even most of the liberals here view firearm law very differently than the average person in Portland or Los Angeles.
Here in NC we have very open gun laws in that they are not terribly strict and while politicians that are dead set on being anti-gun despite knowing very little about guns try to posture like they are going to make some sort of radical change to the existing rules, I think even they know that this crap isn't going to fly in North Carolina.
Love em or hate em, firearms are a large part of North Carolina life and my own community has an over 50% gun ownership rate. This combined with castle doctrine (the legal ability to protect your home, life, and possessions with lethal force) has directly resulted in us having some of the lowest property crimes in the state and also the entire USA.
Yet the politicians on the other side still try, in vain, to change the rules every 2 years or so. In my lifetime they have managed to make really stupid changes to the laws that really didn't affect anyone, but for the most part the people have spoken that they will not allow their representatives to infringe upon their 2nd amendment rights.
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As they always do, the politicians that seek to change the existing gun laws in North Carolina prop these ideas up by using children. They will talk about how the changes are meant to protect kids and just like an episode of South Park that I saw long ago, this discourages anyone from standing up to it because like they said in that episode, if you do oppose it for any reason, that means that you don't like children and you don't care if they get harmed.
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I feel like that even the people that are proposing this know that it isn't going to stick and this is why they go at it the way that they do. Once again, they are not talking about banning any particular type of "assault weapon" even though that is a made up term, instead they are talking about forcing people to store their weapons in a certain way.
I have a gun safe, it is to protect the guns from theft. I was not told I have to get this. I also have several firearms around my house that are not locked up, do not have trigger or barrel locks, and are ready at a moment's notice. This is something that this proposed change to the laws seeks to make illegal. They want me to have to go through a very vigorous process in order to have a weapon at the ready should I need it quickly. That kind of defeats the purpose doesn't it?
They tried this in the past and it failed. They did manage to make a law of sorts that deems that people who have homes with children can be held liable if the weapons are not stored "properly." This obviously has a ton of leeway in it and perhaps it is intentionally ambiguous. Now here is the thing. I think that if you have children (I do not) and you are leaving loaded guns out the way that I do in my house, then yes, you should be prosecuted. I don't need a law on the books to make that seem like the logical thing to do and I don't know any gun owner that would be opposed to that. The reason why we do fight it though is because we are fearful of the overreach of the government. Whose to say that they might not violate your 4th amendment rights under the auspices of enforcing this law or to "protect the children."
perhaps that sounds paranoid on my part but all we have to do is look back to the absurd rights violations that this country and many others implemented during Covid to realize that the government DOES have the ability to violate your rights and given the right circumstances it appears as though they actually really enjoying doing exactly that.
Now back to the case that the liberal lawmakers are presenting to justify these new storage laws. They present statistics but leave rather crucial parts of it out. They point to an increase in youth deaths by firearm but do not present all the information. They continue to present the word "children" but do not mention that by saying children they are referring to anyone that isn't a legal adult. They will put babies on a picture for their cause and present that one or two times that a toddler found an improperly stored weapon and accidentally shot themselves or someone else with it. They present these extremely rare situations and try to act as though this is something that is happening every day when they know damn well that it is not.
They also conceal that suicide is the number one cause of death with firearms. Now do you think that having a weapon stored "correctly" is going to prevent someone from offing themselves with it? Outside of very specific situations that's just absurd.
They also totally neglect to show that the second leading cause of death by firearm is in NC's few metro areas, most notably Charlotte, where a vast majority of these gun homicides are presumed to be from gang-related activities. They definitely don't talk about the races of the perpetrators because well, that would be racist or something. I'll go ahead and tell you though: nearly 70% of all homicides were identified by the courts or witnesses as perpetrated by blacks - who are around 20% of the state's population. But we aren't supposed to talk about that, right?
So let me ask you what this proposed law change is actually going to accomplish? The people who are committing homicide clearly don't care about laws, so a law requiring them to store weapons a certain way isn't going to change a damn thing. People who want to commit suicide are in most situations going to still have access to their own firearms no matter how they are stored. Children, like proper innocent children are so infrequently the victims of this that the statistic intentionally include older teenagers in order to pad the numbers to make it sound a lot more dire than it really is.
The main, and perhaps only demographic that this law will affect will be people that aren't doing anything wrong until a law is created that makes them so. It would affect people like me who just want to be left alone and be able to buy what I want, store it how I want, and just live my life like I want.
The good news is that that this law stands very little chance of actually passing in NC, despite the usual devious tricks that those proposing it use time and time again. I just get sick of seeing the same tired and overused hand being played every 2 years or so.