Here’s some encouraging Second Amendment news after yesterday’s downer about that mayor in New Mexico banning guns in the village of Ruidoso.
More than half of the members of the House of Representatives have co-sponsored a bill, requiring any state or jurisdiction that issues concealed-weapons permits to honor permits granted by any other state or jurisdiction. It’s H.R. 822: The National Right-to-Carry Reciprocity Bill.
John Crewdson reports for Bloomberg News, Sept. 12, 2011, that if Congress passes the bill, Florida’s licenses, for example, would apply to 49 states in all — allowing their holders to carry hidden guns in places such as midtown Manhattan, where the New York Police Department currently rejects most such applications for “concealed- carry” permits.
Only Illinois and Washington, D.C., where residents aren’t allowed to carry concealed handguns at all, would be exempt from the bill.
“Law-abiding people are not immune from crime just because they cross over a state border,” said Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman for the National Rifle Association. The 4 million-member gun-rights group has lobbied state legislatures to pass concealed-carry laws since the 1980s, and it considers the federal “reciprocity” bill a common-sense approach to the state-by-state patchwork of rules, he said.
But John Donohue, a professor at Stanford Law School, says he thinks the bill would be held unconstitutional because it “effectively prevents a state from controlling who has guns within the state, which has always been a core police power function of state government. It is so ironic that it is the conservatives who are trying to push this encroachment, since they usually are very active in championing states’ rights.”
Rules and standards — including safety-training requirements — for granting such licenses vary by state. New Mexico requires 16 hours of training. Ohio requires 12, Texas and Louisiana, 10. At least 10 states require none...
Rest of story>>
