Time For National Carry Laws

Editor’s note: This editorial was written by Alan Korwin, author of Gun Laws of America (gunlaws.com). Recent events have made it painfully obvious that murderous trouble can erupt at any time and in any place. It is a clear and present danger. We can no longer afford to pretend such dangers do not exist. It is irresponsible to continue to imagine that police can be everywhere, or that they can respond with sufficient speed to prevent a homicidal rampage. Police are second responders.

The first responders are always we, the people, on the scene as events unfold. The time has come to insist upon robust restoration of our right to defend ourselves, to keep and bear arms when and where arms might be needed in public places, to forestall these serious known threats to our safety. It is time to press forward for nationally recognized right to carry. The forces aligned against our civil right to arms are disgracefully using an assassin’s heinous crime to foment hatred and attack us.

They are plotting in secret to diminish and impair our cherished rights. Now is not the time to simply rebut their power-hungry vitriol and ignorance. Now is the time to advance a vigorous pro-rights agenda, because it is the righteous response to the problems their anti-freedom efforts have helped to create. We must at last free people from the governmental chains that bind them, and replace those chains with the fullest expression of rights that are so fundamental to the American way of life.

An uninfringed right to keep and bear arms is the moral high ground. Efforts to ban or infringe on these precious rights in any way is both immoral and dangerously reckless, putting innocent people in harm’s way. Remove the obstacles to the constitutionally guaranteed right to defend innocent life against whatever evil may confront us. It is time to secure national carry rights for all law-abiding adult Americans.

National carry must be accompanied by a reinvigorated private effort to educate our children and ourselves in the social utility of firearms, and their safe and legal uses. The purposes and constitutional roots of this most fundamental right must be reintroduced into the nation’s classrooms. Incentives must be brought forth to rebirth a culture of marksmanship, and to once again become the nation of marksmen the Founders envisioned.

It is not enough to simply argue back against those who would deny or restrict our rights with their many and nefarious schemes. It is time for national carry rights for all law-abiding adult Americans.