NC Republicans push bill that will increase homicides and suicides, gun safety experts say

The legislature returns on Monday and could vote to override Gov. Josh Stein’s veto of a bill that would make it far easier to carry a concealed weapon in public. 

Responsible gun owners will tell you it takes skill to shoot an intended target, be it a deer at 100 yards or a series of concentric circles at 15. It’s a skill developed through careful study, practice, and training. 

Accidentally shooting yourself or a stranger, however, is the easiest thing in the world. That doesn’t take any skill or training at all.

Guns are dangerous by design, of course, but the danger is even greater in untrained hands, gun safety experts say, and so proper instruction is essential for gun owners to learn how to safely handle, fire, and store their firearms, especially if they want to legally conceal their weapons in public.

A bill passed this summer by Republicans in the North Carolina General Assembly, however, would remove all background check, permit, and training requirements for concealed carry in the state. In several interviews this month, gun safety experts said these moves would increase the number of homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings in the state. 

The bill, Senate Bill 50, passed the state Senate on pure party lines, but two Republicans in the North Carolina House joined Democrats in voting against it, citing safety concerns. Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, vetoed the bill in June, and though the Senate overrode the veto, Republicans in the House no longer have a supermajority, and will have to persuade all the holdouts in their party and at least one Democrat to switch their votes.

The veto override vote is on the House calendar for Monday, Sept. 22, the first day legislators return from a summer break. 

It is essential that the lawmakers who voted against the bill the first time hold the line, the  experts said.. Requiring concealed carry permits, background checks, and training are not bureaucratic burdens or political talking points, they said, they are about saving lives. 

“You don’t want anybody carrying a firearm without education, period,” Tony DeRico, a gun safety instructor in Raleigh, told Cardinal & Pine. “I don’t care what partisan group you belong to. This isn’t about partisanship, this isn’t about politics. This is about people.”

Because gun safety is not innate: You have to be taught, and there are a million ways for a gun owner to hurt someone if they don’t know what they’re doing: You could drop the gun, forget it’s loaded, fail to check the safety, mistake it for a toy, stick it in your waistband or at the small of your back like you saw in some movie. Some triggers are hard to pull, but others fire at the barest “come here” of your little finger. These are all common mistakes DeRico corrects in his classes.

“If this bill passes, it’s gonna become much easier for someone to injure themselves and makes the rest of us vulnerable to being injured or killed due to [someone else’s] lack of knowledge,” DeRico, the founder of Strategic Tactics of Protection, said.

What does the bill do?

Senate Bill 50 would allow anyone who is not otherwise prohibited to carry a concealed weapon in public without a permit. They would no longer have to pass a background check or take a safety class. The bill would also lower the age requirement for concealed carry from 21 to 18.

The law still prohibits people who meet certain criteria from carrying concealed guns, including anyone currently under indictment for a felony, or those convicted of violent felonies. But without background checks, law enforcement officers lose the main method of enforcing these prohibitions. 

NC Reps. William Brisson (Bladen, Sampson Counties) and Ted Davis Jr. (New Hanover) were the only Republicans who voted against the bill, but the bulk of Republican legislators say the provisions are common sense and remove onerous restrictions to 2nd Amendment rights. 

Guns are part of the cultural fabric in North Carolina, as is gun safety, but there are also a lot of first time gun owners who may not know how to safely handle them.

“We saw a lot of first time gun buyers during the pandemic,” Becky Ceartas, the executive director of North Carolina Against Gun Violence, said in an interview.

“The training is really, really important,” she said. 

When it returns on Monday, the legislature is also expected to prioritize a separate crime bill in response to the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian immigrant who was stabbed to death in August on a Charlotte light rail. 

That bill, House Bill 307, deals mostly with how state courts handle bail and release of suspects with violent histories, changes that House Speaker Destin Hall framed as ensuring public safety by keeping violent offenders off the street.

But if Republicans loosen the concealed carry restrictions, Ceartas and DeRico said, gun safety experts said, they would be making it harder to keep guns away from violent offenders and making it easier for gun owners to accidentally hurt themselves. 

In other states that loosened or eliminated their concealed carry laws, homicides, suicides, and gun thefts skyrocketed.

West Virginia passed permitless carry in 2016. In the following years, gun homicides increased by 48% and suicides by 22%.

“This is simply unacceptable in North Carolina,” Ceartas said. “We cannot afford to be like West Virginia.” 

Protections not burdens

Taking away the training that could prevent unintended tragedies is the opposite of responsible gun legislation, DeRico said. It’s a threat to the general public and to gun owners alike.

He’s been teaching gun safety for more than a decade. It’s his craft, his business. 

“99.9% of the time that you see me, I’m carrying a firearm,” he said, but a gun in the hands of someone who doesn’t know what they are doing “puts all of us in harm’s way.”

He added: “This is not bureaucratic, this is an issue of saving lives.”

DeRico and other trainers teach new gun owners the essentials: Treat every gun as if it is loaded; never look down the barrel; never point a gun at anyone you don’t intend to kill; keep your finger off the trigger until you are ready to shoot. 

These are lessons that must be learned, but safely. Learning the hard way might be the last lesson anyone learns. 

“A bullet doesn’t have brakes and it doesn’t have a steering wheel,” DeRico said. 

Guns are the leading cause of death for young people in NC

Guns are the leading cause of death for young people in the United States and in North Carolina. Car crashes, disease, drownings — they each kill fewer children aged 1-17 than guns.

Gerald Givens Jr., who runs the Raleigh anti-gun violence organization Boots on the Ground, knows this statistic all too well. 

“Young people having access to firearms, this is something that I’ve been dealing with all of my life,” Givens said.

He saw his first gun death at seven years old when a police officer was shot across the street from Givens’ house in Detroit. And he knows that the trauma of gun violence is not limited to those who get shot.

“I personally lost eight family members to gun violence in my lifetime,” he said. Recently, his 2-year old cousin accidentally shot himself to death after finding his father’s firearm.

The bill will not just make it easier for young people to carry concealed firearms, Givens said, it will make it easier for them to kill and die.

After retiring from the Air Force, Givens worked for St. Peter-St. Joseph Children’s Home, a non-profit organization helping abused, abandoned, and neglected children. He knows how frequently the issues of abused children and gun violence collide.

“I saw kids coming from all over the entire world, as young as five years old,” he said, “who struggled with the emotional, social, even academic things that they would have to face in life.” 

He added: “The 18-year-old kids who don’t have anywhere to go and lack financial support — I can’t imagine giving them easier access to a firearm.”

Increased risks to law enforcement and domestic abuse survivors

If the bill becomes law, police officers will now have to treat every interaction like a potentially armed encounter. 

Lawmakers themselves seemed to recognize the specific threat to law enforcement: The bill increases the amount paid to the families of first responders killed in the line of duty, and creates a scholarship fund for the children of first responders “permanently disabled” in the line of duty.

NC Sen. Woodson Bradley, a Democrat who represents Mecklenburg County, also tried to add protections for victims of domestic violence. The bill continues to prohibit people convicted of domestic abuse from carrying a concealed firearm, but Bradley’s amendment would have extended those restrictions to people who have not been convicted, but have pending protective orders filed against them. Protective orders are orders approved by judges that require someone accused of abuse to stay away from the accuser. 

“There’s no more known or unknown repeat offenders like domestic abusers,” Bradley, a survivor of domestic abuse, told Cardinal & Pine this month.

Republicans tabled that idea, which essentially means ignoring the idea without having to debate it or vote against it on the record. 

“That told me everything I needed to know,” she said. “I could not believe they wouldn’t even discuss it.”

Because the bill removes existing background check requirements, it opens huge cracks for convicted abusers to crawl through; because it does not restrict abusers with open protective orders, those cracks get even wider. The bill would make it far easier for known abusers to carry a hidden gun in public places, Bradley said, which is dangerous for spouses and law enforcement alike.

“The scariest and worst call law enforcement can get is to a domestic violence situation,” Bradley, whose husband is a police officer, said.

“It’s dangerous for my husband when he is on patrol. It’s dangerous for me as a survivor and for the thousands of other people that are in that situation.”

She added, “I just don’t understand why anyone would think that’s a good idea.”

During the public comment segment of a committee debate this year, several Raleigh and Durham law enforcement officers voiced their opposition to the legislation.

Permitless carry would make their jobs more difficult and more dangerous, they said.

Durham County Sheriff Clarence Birkhead told the committee concealed carry permits served as a line of defense for himself and his deputies. Removing them would mean they would make every interaction with the public less certain and more dangerous.

“My deputies in Durham County will have to treat every traffic stop, every encounter, like a felony stop,” Birkhead said. “That puts everybody at risk.”

‘You can’t claim ignorance’

Givens spent 20 years in the Air Force, and one of his jobs was to establish and protect safe zones in hostile environments. The Armed Forces do not give soldiers unregulated access to firearms on military bases and facilities, he said, and they would certainly not let the general public carry their weapons on bases the way the General Assembly wants to let them do so in public in North Carolina.

“There is no such thing as concealed carry on a military base,” Givens said.

“Before you could even think about putting your hand on a firearm, you had to go through a background check. And after you went through the background check, we had to go through rigorous training,” he said.

These rules did not violate Constitutional rights, they protected the service members and their families, he said. 

“That’s what’s missing in this bill,” he said. “How are you making our communities safer?”

It’s a question DeRico thinks about in every gun safety class he teaches.

Gun owners should know that whatever is beyond their intended target could also get hit. It’s “one of the basic principles of firearm safety,” DeRico said. 

Perhaps the legislators voting for this bill should sign up, DeRico said, because the principles of responsible gun ownership sometimes overlap with responsible government.

“Once you pull the trigger, the repercussions that follow are all on you,” he said. “You can’t claim ignorance as an excuse.”