The story of American freedom, now almost 250 years on since delegates to the Second Continental Congress signed the Declaration of Independence, leads irrevocably to the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act.
This Act, which has now been reintroduced in the U.S. House of Representatives and in the U.S. Senate, has its roots deep in the founding of this nation. When the U.S. Bill of Rights was added to the U.S. Constitution as its first 10 amendments in 1791, it was recognized that the federal government was a potential threat to Americans’ individual rights. The 10 amendments then were recognized as restrictions only on the federal government.
Later, well after the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified in 1868, the U.S. Supreme Court began using this amendment’s Due Process Clause to find that some of those rights are also restrictions on the state and local governments.
In 2010, the high court affirmed this protection extended to the Second Amendment in McDonald v. Chicago, declaring that state and local governments also cannot infringe upon citizens’ Second Amendment-protected rights.
Nevertheless, America is still a patchwork of laws regulating the carrying of arms by law-abiding citizens. As this was being written, 29 of our 50 states allow some type of constitutional carry—laws that generally get the government out of the way of the citizenry’s right to bear arms. But a good armed citizen, by taking a wrong turn near a state line, can still be charged with committing a crime for carrying a handgun in a jurisdiction in which they don’t specifically have a permit to do so—a crime that is sometimes a felony offense.
This is why the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act is so important. As the Biden administration made vividly clear not that long ago, federal officials can still be a threat to this constitutionally protected freedom. And while Biden is no longer in office, many state and local officials remain a danger to the Second Amendment.
But now we have a president who has said he will sign national reciprocity if it comes to his desk. President Donald Trump’s (R) support is a historic opportunity that cannot be missed. If Americans have a right that is specifically protected from government infringement, and they clearly do, then that right is diminished if they can’t freely carry that right with them.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), who introduced this Act in the Senate, put this plainly in a post on X when he said, “Today I’m introducing the National Constitutional Carry Act in the U.S. Senate. Americans have the right to keep and bear arms without asking for permission from hostile politicians or getting jailed for crossing the wrong state line. Stay strapped.”
The legislation is less than 700 words (or about the length of this article). It simply states that “an individual who is not prohibited by Federal law from possessing, transporting, shipping, or receiving a firearm, and who is carrying a government-issued photographic identification document and a valid license or permit which is issued pursuant to the law of a State and which permits the individual to carry a concealed firearm, may possess or carry a concealed handgun … [in a jurisdiction that] has a statute that allows residents of the State to obtain licenses or permits to carry concealed firearms; or does not prohibit the carrying of concealed firearms by residents of the State for lawful purposes … .”
This legislation would not allow a prohibited person to carry a firearm, nor would it allow a nonresident to carry in areas in which local laws prohibit carry. Basically, it would simply allow law-abiding armed citizens who have permits to carry to behave as other law-abiding armed citizens do in other areas of the United States.
This is not how some politicians and members of the mainstream media are characterizing this proposed legislation, but anyone who reads this Act can see this to be true. More Americans need to be told the truth about this simple, freedom-abiding legislation.
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