Just a week after Louisiana became the 28th, South Carolina is set to become the 29th state to adopt permitless carry. Here’s NBC:
South Carolina lawmakers officially passed permitless carry on Tuesday.
House Bill 3594, also known, as the South Carolina Constitutional Carry/Second Amendment Preservation Act” was passed by South Carolina senators Wednesday with a final vote of 28 to 18.
House lawmakers passed the bill Tuesday, 86 to 33.
Naturally, the story contains a quote such as this:
“It’s really scary to me that we are this close to passing such a reckless bill in this state,” Sen. Mia McLeod said.
Is it? Why? 28 other states have this system, and there is no evidence it has done anything bad at all. As a matter of fact, not one of the states that has adopted constitutional carry has repealed it — or even held a hearing to that effect. The evidence clearly shows that there is nothing “reckless” about refusing to mandate that the people who are not the problem obtain permits before they exercise their rights. This being so, one wonders why any state would continue to do so.
One of the state senators who opposes the measure told NBC that:
“We’re going to find ourselves in a situation where somebody is going to get killed, and it’s going to try to strike real close to home. The wrong person is going to get killed, and then we are going to come find ourselves coming back in here and saying we need to protect law enforcement,” Matthews said.
I’m afraid that I don’t know what this means. Constitutional carry does not allow excluded people to buy, possess, or carry firearms; those people remain just as prohibited as they were before. Nor does it prevent the police from checking to see if an arrested person is allowed to carry a gun. To believe that to remove the permitting process for eligible citizens is to make life more dangerous for the police is thus to believe either (a) that law-abiding people will suddenly become more dangerous if they aren’t required to apply for a permit, or (b) that the sort of convicted criminal who is willing to shoot a cop might somehow be dissuaded from doing so by the requirement that he apply for a small piece of laminated plastic that he is legally unable to obtain in the first instance. Neither of these arguments is persuasive to me — or, it seems, given the remarkable spread of permitless carry, to many other people, either.