PA Bill Number: HB1661
Title: Further providing for schedules of controlled substances; and providing for secure storage of xylazine.
Description: Further providing for schedules of controlled substances; and providing for secure storage of xylazine. ...
Last Action: Act No. 17 of 2024
Last Action Date: May 15, 2024
SCOTUS ruling should open door for nat'l CCW recognition, say activists :: 06/29/2015
Friday’s landmark 5-4 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court on same-sex marriage should open the door for national concealed carry recognition, some gun rights advocates, including the head of a national Second Amendment group, are saying.
The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said in a press release that the same principle should apply to nationwide state recognition of concealed carry licenses and permits from all other states. And Bob Owens at Bearing Arms.com seems to concur.
“I’ll be driving through the District of Columbia, Maryland, New Jersey, and New York in several weeks,” Owens wrote this morning, “places that until yesterday I did not have a legal right to concealed carry. As of today, with this decision, it would seem that these states and the District must honor my concealed carry permit, or violate my constitutional rights under the 14th and Second Amendment.”
Maybe, maybe not, but CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb evidently thinks that’s the way things ought to be. To say otherwise might amount to a lot of hypocrisy from the anti-gun left.
“State drivers’ licenses are universally recognized,” Gottlieb said in a press release, “and with today’s high court ruling, same-sex marriage must now be recognized in all 50 states as well. It not only stands to reason, but common sense demands that the concealed carry licenses held by more than 11 million citizens across the country should now be valid in every state without question.”
But that’s not the way it is and Gottlieb’s organization understands that perhaps better than anyone. CCRKBA is a grassroots outfit with more than 650,000 members and supporters across the country. National concealed carry recognition has been a perennial discussion topic at the annual Gun Rights Policy Conference, co-sponsored by CCRKBA and the Second Amendment Foundation.
In some states, the group noted, law-abiding citizens have been “egregiously prosecuted” for conduct that is perfectly legal in their home state. One example is the Shaneen Allen case involving a young single African-American mother who went through all the hoops in her home state of Pennsylvania to get a carry license. She was stopped by a New Jersey police officer after crossing into that state from Philadelphia to attend a function, acknowledged to the cop right up front that she had her handgun, and ended up in jail.
New Jersey dubs itself as the “Garden State,” but in Allen’s case, it was more like a weed patch. She had the services of a skilled attorney, and she ended up in a program rather than the pen, but Gov. Chris Christie granted her a pardon earlier this year for having committed a crime in New Jersey that is not a crime at all in Pennsylvania.
“To paraphrase what Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy said about same-sex marriage,” Gottlieb said, “no right is more profound than the right of self-preservation, and under the Constitution, all citizens should be able to exercise the right of self-defense anywhere in the country. It disparages their ability to do so, and diminishes their personhood to deny the right to bear arms they have in their home states when they are visiting other states.”
Legally armed citizens have gone through background checks, which gun prohibitionists are constantly pointing to as a wonderful thing, and in many states they also must take a training course. That should be more than enough to satisfy anyone’s concerns, unless they simply want to erase the Second Amendment, which anti-gunners consistently claim to “support.”
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