If facts really mattered, consider the following:
- This month in your state, just a week apart, two CCW permit holders perpetrated two separate mass shootings (Chapel Hill and Wilmington) that claimed six lives, 3 in each incident. The Chapel Hill slaying of three Muslim students, each sustaining a gunshot wound to the head, garnered international attention. And the Wilmington shooting claimed three lives in a murder-suicide that included the death of a pregnant woman’s fetus (she was shot both in the head and the abdomen while in the presence of her children). There was no waiting period required for the Wilmington shooter to purchase a gun as he had a CCW permit; the weapon he used was purchased within an hour of the incident.
- Although public access to CCW permit holder identification has been blocked in many states through the legislative efforts of the gun lobby (including North Carolina), in recent years 544 incidents of non-self defense shootings by CCW permit holders (permit identified by news media) have been reported in 36 states and the District of Columbia that claimed 722 lives; included are 17 law enforcement officers and 28 mass shooting incidents resulting in the deaths of 136 victims. As this is only what can be culled from media reports, the figures are held to be a considerable underestimate. Does Congress really hold that hundreds of news media reports across the nation have this all wrong? This should bear attention.
- Although there is much rhetoric about the right of ‘law-abiding citizens’ to defend themselves, examination of FBI data shows that guns are rarely used to kill criminals or stop crimes in the United States. Over the past several years criminal gun homicides outnumbered justifiable gun homicides some forty-fold in our country without any reproducible evidence of an offsetting public benefit. Another recent FBI report, using a tight set of definitions, tracked a steadily increasing number of mass shootings between 2000 – 2013, 160 in total that caused 1,043 casualties (486 killed, 557 wounded) – in only one instance did a private citizen with a firearms permit participate in the resolution, whereas many have been reported to be perpetrators of such crimes.
- Despite the word ‘Constitutional’ in the title of this legislation, it has not been held that the Second Amendment confers a right to carry a concealed weapon (reference Justice Scalia’s writing for the majority in Heller as well as Peterson v. Garcia where the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit unanimously held that the Second Amendment does not provide a right to carry concealed weapons in public).
