Happy Labor Day Weekend, folks!
This week, I took a look at how the big fight over abortion in Texas will likely impact gun politics too. And Jake Fogelman takes a look at the roots of North Carolina’s pistol-purchase permit to answer the question of just how racist it is.
I hope you have a restful, pleasant, and safe weekend with family and friends. Maybe even get some recreational shooting in? Or, at least, some yummy grilling.
Hopefully, you can also find some time to listen to Active Self Protection’s John Correia on the podcast. He’s really doing some incredible work analyzing real-life deadly-force encounters on his incredibly successful YouTube channel. Then he and his team take it a step further by applying lessons learned to self-defense training.
Analysis: Texas Abortion Tactic Likely to be Copied by Gun-Control Activists [Member Exclusive]
By Stephen Gutowski
The fight over abortion reached new levels in Texas this week, but it’s likely to spill over into another hot-button issue: gun control.
That’s because the Texas pro-life bill has struck on a novel strategy. And that strategy saw success this week. It managed to short-circuit efforts in the federal courts to get enforcement blocks put into place before the expansive abortion ban went into effect. Even the Supreme Court decided against intervening at this point.
And that success will breed copycats.
Texas used a new enforcement mechanism to confound its opponents in court. Instead of making it a criminal offense to perform or assist in carrying out an abortion after 6 weeks and relying on government agents to enforce the ban, they made it a civil offense and empowered regular people to sue as an enforcement mechanism.
This complicated things for pro-choice activists fighting the law. It is much easier for a court to temporarily restrain a government agent from enforcing a law while the case makes its way through the legal system. But it’s a lot harder to enjoin millions of civilians from filing civil suits.
Whether you think this is a good way to try and impose new abortion restrictions or you believe it’s necessary to save lives, it’s unlikely this tactic stops with pro-life activists. Many gun-control activists are just as willing to use novel tactics to try and impose new gun restrictions and believe it’s necessary to save lives.
It is very easy to envision legislatures in California or Hawaii passing a similar law restricting the kinds of guns their citizens can own or even how many of them they can have. Instead of making it a criminal offense enforced by the government, they can pass the same kind of civil violation and empower civilians to sue over them. They can even use the same tactic of not making the gun owner liable but, instead, the gun dealer or even gun trainers who advise their students on what guns to buy.
Of course, courts usually catch up with novel approaches like this eventually. It’s likely the Texas abortion law will get blocked at some point. It may be ruled unconstitutional even by the Supreme Court itself.
But the tactic has worked thus far to get the restrictions into effect. And, unless the courts make a big show of striking it down, that early success will be enough for legislatures to try it on other issues. Gun control is probably at the top of that list of issues too.
Whatever you think of this new legal tactic, don’t expect it to stay a unique approach for long.
Podcast: Active Self Protection’s John Correia on Evidence-Based Armed Defense Training [Member Early Access]
By Stephen Gutowski
This week’s guest is John Correia of Active Self Protection. He gives us a deep dive into what it’s like to run a YouTube business with millions of followers. He also talks about why he takes a different, less-polarizing approach to making gun content for the internet.
John has been studying and breaking down deadly-force encounters caught on video for years now. His channel has become the premier place for evidence-based advice on how best to survive an attack. And he shares some of the biggest insights he’s gained doing the endless research required to build his channel and Active Self Protection’s unique training courses.
Contributing writer Jake Fogelman and I also give an update on the CDC’s new push to fund gun research and just how many guns were sold in August. Plus, I talk to Reload member Cal Davis about his background with guns and why he decided to subscribe!
You can listen to the full podcast here or on your favorite podcasting app.
You can also watch the podcast on our YouTube channel.
Analysis: How Racist Is North Carolina’s Pistol-Purchase Permit? [Member Exclusive]
By Jake Fogelman
North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper (D.) vetoed a bill to repeal the state’s pistol-purchase permit requirements without deigning to address critiques of racism associated with the current system. But what is the history of the permit requirement?
The law was passed in 1919, in the midst of Jim Crow segregation throughout the southern states. Historical records at the time of the bill’s passing don’t provide a great deal of detail on any explicitly racial motivations, but the context of the era is enlightening.
Just 20 years prior, the 1898 Wilmington Race Riot occurred where a white mob burned down the local black-owned newspaper and subsequently seized control of the local government. The upheaval created a cascade of effects across North Carolina, as segregationists became emboldened in their opposition to continued reconstruction efforts. As a result, legalized segregation (Jim Crow) and the disenfranchisement of black citizens became the norm in the state and would not be dismantled until the Civil Rights Movement.
North Carolina also has a history of overtly racist gun-control regulations.
In 1840, the state passed a law similar in nature to the 1919 purchase permit law but more explicit in its racist intent. The state outlawed the keeping or carrying of “any shot gun, musket, rifle, pistol, sword, dagger, or bowie knife,” by “any free negro, mulatto, or free person of color” unless they “obtained a license therefor from the Court of Pleas and Quarter Sessions of his or her county, within one year preceding the wearing, keeping or carrying thereof.”
North Carolina is not unique in this fact. Many southern states had similar laws explicitly prohibiting blacks from possessing firearms throughout the antebellum period. However, after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868, future gun restrictions had to be race-neutral in their text. But Jim Crow states continued to find ways to discriminate in the enforcement of “neutral” gun laws.
One such restriction was an 1893 Florida law requiring a license to carry or possess a pistol or repeating rifle. While the law as written did not make any qualifications based on race, a Florida Supreme Court justice said in 1941 the law was “never intended to be applied to the white population and in practice has never been so applied.”
The law at issue in North Carolina is facially race-neutral.
The statute says “It is unlawful for any person, firm, or corporation in this State to sell, give away, or transfer, or to purchase or receive, at any place within this State from any other place within or without the State any pistol unless: (i) a license or permit is first obtained under this Article by the purchaser or receiver from the sheriff of the county in which the purchaser or receiver resides.”
The law also requires that the issuing sheriff must verify that the applicant is of “good moral character.”
This “good moral character” component is where the controversy arises. As with the aforementioned Florida law, an element of discretion is granted in the permit approval process which provides bad actors with an opportunity to apply the law unequally. Corruption scandals have been uncovered in recent years, in places such as New York and California, where discretionary pistol permitting rules have facilitated vastly unequal applications of the law by local law-enforcement officials.
And there is at least some evidence that this unequal application exists currently in North Carolina as well. A 2021 North Carolina Law Review article found that blacks in certain counties were denied permits at much higher rates than were whites between 2015 and 2020.
“In practice, the Wake County Sheriff’s Office rejected 8.37% of White applicants, while rejecting 23.54% of Black applicants,” said Nicholas Gallo, the author of the article. “This amounts to Black applicants experiencing a rejection rate of approximately three times the rate of White applicants. Given Wake County’s similar racial composition to that of North Carolina as a whole, Wake County potentially represents statewide trends.”
This evidence of racial disparities is not automatically indicative of racist intent. The article does not disclose reasons for permit rejection and merely points to the unequal outcomes of one county in North Carolina. But the United States in recent years has increasingly reckoned with the persisting effects of laws passed in eras of de jure racism, and that introspection should not vanish when the topic is America’s gun laws.
Given the historical context of the law and the known tradition of southern states moving to disarm blacks, plus the evidence of persisting inequality of the law, the racial component of the North Carolina pistol-purchase permit shouldn’t escape scrutiny.
That’s it for now.
I’ll talk to you all again soon.
Thanks,
Stephen Gutowski
Founder
The Reload
