It’s Always Been Antithetical to the Spirit of the Constitution to Require a License to Carry a Firearm.

1. Great job with the signs Shannon Watts. They’ll reduce the bottom line, and be TOTALLY IGNORED by gun toting criminals intending to rob and/or do harm.
   You do you SW🤪
   I’m in the D/FW area of Texas, lots of places without signs willing to have my business. 👍

2. I have been open-carrying for the past couple of months. Just because.

   Today, a woman asked why I felt a need to carry a gun in the park. I replied: “Well, you never need a gun until you do, and, the 2nd Amendment protects my right to be prepared”. She, then, said: “By carrying that gun you are infringing upon my right to be safe”. So, I said “I am not doing anything to make you unsafe; aside from talking, I am not doing anything to you, at all. She, then, repeated that me carrying a gun made her feel unsafe and that is a violation of her rights.

   This was a hopeless conversation, so, I told her to enjoy the sunshine and the beautiful day, and I turned to walk away. She yelled “It cannot be a beautiful day while you are carrying a gun”.

   I waved and kept walking. The tone of her voice led me to believe that continued conversation would only agitate her. When people are agitated, they sometimes do dumb things.

   • where you screwed up was waving at the end.. i would’ve gave her the finger…. and if she wanted to “do stupid things” …… well, that’s on her…..

     • “i would’ve gave her the finger….”

       ” “You should have said :

       “Lady, seek professional help for your neuroses…” ”

       Why try to feed the beast??? Negative, or derogatory commenting will only add fuel to one’s “argument” that the exercise of the Second Amendment is, in an of itself, a violent act. It is not, and firearms do not act on their own.

       In the early days of spreading the Good News, the Apostle Paul admonished the Nazarene (early Christians) to live exemplary lives and not to leave themselves open to criticism for their actions and beliefs, so that when charges were brought against them and the truth known, the exposed accusor would be shown to be the real aggressor and become embarrassed and slink away. By smiling, waving, and saying “Have a nice day” it’s pretty difficult for anyone to claim you are threatening them.

       Until one unholsters a firearm, any “threat” is merely in the mind of the “beholder”. Keeping it that way is important should things escalate by having “the law” being contacted. Personally, I don’t want to have to try to explain things to a cop who might be called in…

   • “She yelled “It cannot be a beautiful day while you are carrying a gun”.”

     You should have said :

     “Lady, seek professional help for your neuroses…”

     • Geoff,

       Just being a good ambassador for the POTG.

   • When someone arrives at their position via emotion, you aren’t going to be able to bring them back with logic. Ask me how I know.

   • Would not of even engaged her especially after the right to feel safe comment. Unfortunately this country is overwhelmed by these special snowflakes.

     As someone who lived in Texas a number of years found them to be fairly antiguan. Hopefully that is changing, still remeber some years back a guy from Louisiana ooen carrying at Homedepot. It was embarrassing telling him it was not legal here in Texas.

     • Also HEB is horrible and if you own guns and patronize them you are part of the problem.

       • HEB? Are you confused, or what?

     • For real. I would have said if she didn’t feel safe then walk the fuck away and go mind her own business. She encounters people 10x more likely to be violent than someone open carrying on a daily basis.

   • If she felt like you could go off and start blasting at any moment, how stupid does she have to be to antagonize you? By confronting you, she is admitting that you aren’t a threat. She’s not threatened — she’s whining.

     • Anymouse,

       Good point!!

   • Strangely, she felt unsafe in the presence of a gun, but truly, she was actually safer being there, as any mugger or rapest would be less likely to engage multiple people, especially someone armed. She was being protected by proximity to a gun.

   • Park guy…You should have asked her if she would feel safe if you had a butcher knife, zip ties, stun gun and pepper spray while you wander around in the shadows with your pants unzipped. Better yet step back and put her on video and ask her to leave you alone or you’ll call the police.

     Nitwits like her walk all around mall parking lots with two ton projectiles all around and never notice they could be squashed like a bug if someone looses control. Or if someone intentionally uses one to run down a busy body.

     • Oh, I like that video idea. I think I’m stealing that.

   • The more proper response to such silliness, I believe, is to point out that if my gun REALLY made her feel unsafe, she would have departed the area in order to regain her safety. The very LAST thing she would ever do would be to confront me, risking her very life? So the entire confrontation was a lie, she simply wishes to feel important by attempting to control a complete stranger’s life via being so horrendously and transparently brain-dead obnoxious. And that she should seek professional help.

   • You know the same woman said the sight of the cross made her feel unsafe, as did sunlight. I guess its because of who these Lefturds sold their sould to. By the way as my ole dad used to say, put on uoir big boy pants and suck it up, no one cares how you feel. Deal with it.

3. First things first…. all gun laws are unconstitutional…

   “If the State converts a right (liberty) into a privilege, the citizen can ignore the license and fee and engage in the right (liberty) with impunity.”

   The 2nd Amendment and guns rights are not for hunting they are for killing humans before those humans kill you!

   Since the Democrats as usual can’t create a compelling and reasonably rational argument to disarm innocent Americans, they’re going to their tried and true redefining a word to foot their agenda, logical fallacies and the ensuing propaganda to confuse people into thinking that’s excellent “commo sense” even when it’s anything but…. what is the point of gun control? Gun control is usually sold to the public on grounds of public safety, but evidence for that is essentially non-existent.

   Gun controls not supposed to work it’s supposed to punish honest law abiding citizens from being able to defend themselves.

   To ban a gun because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless and that the law will allow them to have only those rights which the lawless allow. Society does not control crime, ever, by forcing the law abiding to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of criminals. Society controls crime by forcing the criminals to accommodate themselves to the behavior of the law abiding.

   The National Rifle Association has been in support of workable, enforceable gun control legislation since its very inception in 1871.”
   — NRA Executive Vice President Franklin L. Orth
   NRA’s American Rifleman Magazine, March 1968, P. 22

   It started with the Sullivan Act of 1911, the first law in any state (other than the slave codes) to require a license for mere possession of a pistol, even in the home. That is today’s “premises license,” a license for a person to “have and possess [a pistol or revolver] in his dwelling….” For an all-but-unattainable “carry license,” one must show “proper cause” in the arbitrary mind of an official.

   The first person sentenced under the Sullivan Act was a worker named Marino Rossi, who was arrested for carrying a .38-caliber revolver in his hip pocket. The New York Times, in September 1911, reported: “Rossi explained that he was carrying the gun from fear of the Black Hand, and that his friends had warned him to do so in this city. He said that he was in fear of his life. He had no intention of using it wrongfully, and he was an honest working man and desired to know why it was that Black Handers were not arrested for carrying guns as well as law-abiding people.”

   While sentencing Rossi to one year in the Sing Sing penitentiary, Judge Warren Foster expressed no concern about the lack of protection for citizens from criminal gangs like the Black Hand; instead, the judge lectured Rossi on the bad customs of Italian immigrants: “You can say … that it was the custom of yourself as well as your countrymen to carry guns. You say you did not realize that you were breaking the law in so doing. It is unfortunate that this is the custom with you and your kind, and that fact, combined with your irascible nature, furnishes much of the criminal business in this country…. I and my colleagues on the bench intend to stamp out this habit, and with this end in view it is our object to let the community know that the violators of the Sullivan law are going to be severely punished.”

   Another defendant on the docket that day was Gustav A. Kessler, a night watchman, who “had to work late at night in a dangerous part of the city, and wanted a revolver for protection against gangsters. He said he did not get a permit because he did not feel that he could spare $10 of his small wages to carry a $5 revolver.” He was just another poor workingman left defenseless by the government and then persecuted by the government.

   The next day The New York Times praised the one-year prison sentence of Rossi, whose “hot-headed countrymen” customarily carried concealed weapons, adding: “The Judge’s warning to the Italian community was timely and exemplary.” The Times has had a long history of contempt for gun owners in the poorer classes.

   A test case was brought challenging the requirement of a license to keep a pistol in the home. As described in People v. Warden of City Prison (1913), Joseph Darling notified the police that he had a pistol at home and had no license, for which he was arrested. His defense was “the inherent and inalienable right to keep and bear arms.”
   The court acknowledged New York’s Civil Rights Law, which has a provision much like the Second Amendment, and said that “we fully recognize the proposition that the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights were not created by such declaration. They are of such character as necessarily pertain to free men in a free state.” But they upheld the law anyway, because they felt it regulated rather than prohibited the right. The court added: “If the Legislature had prohibited the keeping of arms, it would have been clearly beyond its power.”

   Imagine our Founders’ reaction to a law that limited possession of arms to those with a permit from the government. Now realize that, from there, the places like New York City have pushed the envelope so far that, in the last few decades, we have seen outright bans on handguns and ordinary rifles.

   Since the Sullivan Act referred only to firearms that could be concealed on the person, the dissent in the above case noted that it did not apply to “a blunderbuss or a horse pistol,” which were too large to be concealed. He suggested that “the professional criminal will generally violate the act and take his chances of discovery and punishment, while the law-abiding citizen will be obliged to disarm himself of his only effective protection against the predatory classes.”

   While World War II raged, New York courts held that they must defer to issuing authorities on whether an applicant for a license to carry a concealed pistol had “proper cause” to utilize their rights. In Moore v. Gallup (1943), the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court of New York opined that the right to bear arms, protected by the N.Y. Civil Rights Law, meant the same as the federal Second Amendment. But it added that the Second Amendment does not apply to the States, leaving one to wonder what the New York provision applied to if not to the State.

   While holding that the state could ban carrying a pistol without a license, the Court also said that “the Second Amendment created no right to bear arms, a right which long ante-dated the adoption of the Federal Constitution….” If that suggested a natural or common-law right of the individual, the court next added that the Second Amendment’s only purpose is “to enable the Federal Government to maintain the public security.” If that was not enough to discount any personal liberty, the court added that “the arms to which the Second Amendment refers include weapons of warfare to be used by the militia, such as swords, guns, rifles and muskets … but not pistols,” which “are habitually carried by … gangsters.”

   Yet the case was about a law-abiding citizen and Great War veteran who was appealing the denial of a license to carry a pistol. A friend-of-the-court brief was filed by two gun clubs, and another by the National Rifle Association, represented by Karl T. Frederick, a former Olympic shooter and Harvard Law graduate. The case had nothing to do with “gangsters.” (That seems to be the first NRA amicus brief ever filed in a court.)
   The dissent would have held that such construction of the law violated the right to keep and bear arms. It noted the current perceived threat of a foreign invasion, which demonstrated the “need of the citizens to become proficient in the use of firearms….” (German U-boats had sunk 397 ships off America’s coasts, including in New York harbors, in the first six months of 1942.)

   The Moore case set the stage for how New York courts would, to this very day, view the incredible shrinking “right of the people” to bear arms not actually to include “the people,” but only an elite endorsed by the authorities.

   It bears recalling that there is no municipal liability in New York “for failure to provide special protection to a member of the public who was repeatedly threatened with personal harm and eventually suffered dire personal injuries for lack of such protection.” That was the 1968 ruling in the infamous case of Linda Riss, who was repeatedly denied police protection against threatened harm and who was then viciously attacked. As the dissent pointed out, “in conformity, to the dictates of the law, Linda did not carry any weapon for self-defense…. Thus, by a rather bitter irony she was required to rely for protection on the City of New York which now denies all responsibility to her.”
   Nothing has changed since 1911 when Marino Rossi carried a pistol for protection against the Black Hand, for which he was sentenced to a year in prison. New York’s assurances that it will protect you and you don’t “need” a gun for protection are worthless.

   Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, dissented when the U.S Supreme Court declined to review the Ninth Circuit’s opinion in Peruta v. County of San Diego (2016), which upheld California’s “may issue” carry license law. His words should resonate with judges who, like Judge Foster when he sent Rossi to Sing Sing, just don’t care about ordinary people who need to protect themselves from violent crime: “For those of us who work in marbled halls, guarded constantly by a vigilant and dedicated police force, the guarantees of the Second Amendment might seem antiquated and superfluous. But the Framers made a clear choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear arms for self-defense. I do not think we should stand by idly while a State denies its citizens that right, particularly when their very lives may depend on it.”
   How Does New York City Get Away With This?

   I know most gun owners and gun organizations are not comfortable with Concealed/Open Constitutional Carry (or no CCW permits/licenses required) options. But its just a another form of Gun Control

   Concealed weapons permits – what it’s like to have your civil liberties/rights licensed much like a privilege.

   1. What is a CCW?
   a. a permit to carry a concealed weapon is just another way your government attempts to control your behavior. It is a licensing of your right to bear arms, perhaps the only enumerated right that we openly license.

   2. What is a CCW supposed to do?
   a. the whole idea behind the concealed weapons permit process is to make certain that only the “good guys” are carrying guns and other concealed weapons out there among the rest of us. It is designed to keep guns out of the hands of the “bad guys” and thereby prevent violent crime.

   3. Are CCW really needed to help ensure our safety?
   a. the whole idea of a concealed weapons permit is absolutely unnecessary because the process only applies to the law abiding. As you’ll probably come to agree, the law abiding are the ones who we shouldn’t have concern about in the first place, so why try to regulate their actions?

   Reminder the answers are coming from a Libertarian/Voluntaryist bent

   Gun control has been with us for many generations. A concealed weapons permit is just another form of it; gun control regardless of the intentions, it really only punishes the innocent and law-abiding among us, and does nothing but benefit the criminal-minded.

   The idea behind the permit process is to supposedly keep the guns out of the wrong hands. Those that “qualify” and are “allowed permission” should have guns on the street, so why is it that criminals everywhere have guns if they so choose? The answer is simple, they pay for them on the black market. It is so ironic that the criminal underworld operates very much on the basis of free enterprise, whereas the free market economy operated in the light of day has many restrictions that cause it to be not so very free after all.

   In other words, the law-abiding are faced with the restrictions such as applications, training, fingerprinting and waiting for approval, and the lawless are not.

   Simply put, the law-abiding are the ones that apply for a concealed weapons permit. Even if criminals do apply, they generally won’t be approved (if the process works correctly), so again only the law-abiding will have a permit. The law-abiding are the ones who we should not fear, and yet they are the ones who we are trying to regulate. Criminals are indeed the ones we have something to be concerned about and fear yet they aren’t regulated at all; until they commit a crime. While not committing a crime they would appear as any other law-abiding citizen on the street.

   Governments are imposing a regulatory burden on the law-abiding. This regulatory burden is indeed a penalty of sorts for being a law-abiding citizen. Criminals has no such regulatory burden, unless they are apprehended during their involvement in a crime and are in possession of a concealed deadly weapon. Though oftentimes these “in possession of” minor-criminal offenses are plea-bargained away in favor of prosecuting the major offenses, or a criminal pleads guilty to the misdemeanor of concealed carry as a lesser offense in order to escape prosecution of the more serious crimes.

   And also remember to notify government authorities of your changes of address, and periodically pay a fee to be reissued your permit to carry a concealed weapon. More theft by extortion.

   • Interesting…I had no knowledge of this.

     • news to me as well.

     • That 397 ships really got me!

   • Very good post…Gun Control is what remains of slave shacks, nooses, burning crosses, concentration camps, gas chambers, swastikas and the like. As long as there is Gun Control the aforementioned is anything but dead.

     The 1968 Gun Control Act needs to be ripped from the books and burned. The problem is too many people are clueless because those who should have defined Gun Control according to its racist and genocide roots failed to do so. That mistake must be corrected by taking the 2A off the table and putting Gun Control and all of its diabolical baggage on the table.

     • Lets not forget that the NRA has been an advocate and backroom/closed door dealer for every unconstitutional gun law ever passed in the US.

       Save the NRA? They’re just an anti- gun group masquerading as a gun rights advocacy group, that is a money laundering front for the anti- gun politicians and the democratic national party.

       it’s a widely known open secret that the NRA has written and or advocated for every single unconstitutional law that’s passed since 1911’s NY Sullivan’s Act, National Firearms Act (“NFA”) (1934), Federal Firearms Act of 1938 (“FFA”), Gun Control Act of 1968 (“GCA”), Undetectable Firearms Act (1988), Gun-Free School Zones Act (1990), and more recently bump stock bans.

       https://time.com/4431356/nra-gun-control-history/

       Lest you think that the NRA would contest the claims of historically anti-American civil liberties hoplophobic news magazine. The NRA bragged about its anti-gun history in passing these unconstitutional laws. The NRA has been a stealing and misappropriating its members donations for over 140 years to advocate and write laws that its members never wanted. They wrote and advocated for every unconstitutional law from the 1911 NY Sullivan’s Act, all the other state “license and registration edicts” to all the federal acts… while pretending to advocate for civil liberties and taking money from those trying to protect their rights

       The NRA
       http://jpfo.org/articles-assd02/nra-supported-nfa34.htm

       The 1911 N.Y. Sullivan gun control act was written to protect the N.Y.C mob.

       The father of New York gun control was “Big Tim “Sullivan — a state senator and Tammany Hall crook, a criminal mobster overseer of the gangs … Meanwhile, savor the irony of an edict written by a corrupt politician to save his bad guys from the electric chair’s was used against law-abiding citizens, basically taking guns away from honest business owners stopping them from shooting the criminals that wanted to collect protection fees.

       Story link
       https://nypost.com/2012/01/16/the-strange-birth-of-nys-gun-laws/

       Story link
       http://www.americanmafia.org/famous-gangsters/tim-sullivan-the-mobster-and-perfect-tammany-hall-politician/

4. Signs, signs everywhere signs …………… which I ignore and will continue to do so.

   • Yeah, I love that somebody thinks the Demanding Moms can show you how signage can keep guns out of your establishment. I’d like to see that signage, since I haven’t violated such signage since day before yesterday. So, just how is that signage going to accomplish anything at all?

     • Seems to me that most mass shootings have signs that say “Gun Free Zone.” I think we ought to plaster the Capitol and WH with these signs.

5. Texas this and Texas that. Theres other staes that have constitutional carry you know.

   • But possum, Texas is the most populous! And is a leader in showing the way to moar freedom for the masses! Always a good thing.

   • That may be, but those states are not Texas! See now?

     • Hurts not to be Texas, you could be Delaware or Vermont, or even worse New Jersey.

6. Well, Texas is the flavor of the month. SWatts and her unmerry band of misfits need to dance for their bloombucks somewhere. Why not somewhere in the 2nd A news.
   I’ll bet she has LOTS of armed security while doing her “grassroots” anti-gun sign mounting around Texas businesses. 🤔
   Oh, armed security for me, but none for thee, huh Sharon.
   Hypocrisy, thy political affiliation is democratic.

7. “. . . it has always been antithetical to the spirit of the Constitution to require a license to exercise a right clearly defined in the Second Amendment of the Bill of Rights.”

   Let’s all stand and clap our hands at this statement.

   Now that we have done so, what does this statement really mean? If it were true then we should have, at least, a cause of action to seek to have the NFA`34 declared UN-Constitutional. Isn’t this so?

   If it IS so, then let’s get to it! Prepare the case, find a suitable plaintiff, raise the funding through some crowd-source funding web site. Let’s have at it.

   But, perhaps, it’s NOT so straightforward as this. Maybe our applause was premature. In this, the alternative case, we really have our work cut out for us. We have to be able to articulate the legal argument for how it is that a particular law is – we assert – UN-Constitutional. Not so easy.

   Does the NFA`34 – or any given state’s CWP law – “infringe” on the right to keep or bear arms? Is the fee the law imposes a “tax” which is forbidden by the Constitution?

   It has taken us a decade to get from Heller/McDonald to NYSR&PA v Bruen; and, we still haven’t crossed the finish line. We will be there in less than a year. In that case, the argument is that NYS’s executive and judicial discretion in refusing to issue a license is an infringement. This argument will probably prevail.

   That will be just the first step in a long road. Will we be able to show that foot-dragging under a Shall-Issue regime is also an infringement? Will we be able to show that the amount of an application fee is an infringement? Or, alternatively, an UN-Constitutional imposition of the taxing power?

   It will take more than a heart-felt bold assertion to persuade SCOTUS to strike-down a gun permitting law.

   • A rope and a tree works for me. The courts, like the entire government is out of control. Time to burn it all down and start again. If the founding fathers were here they’d nuke the swamp.

8. I’ve carried for 30+ years. I will never ask for permission to exercise a right spelled out in the supreme law of the land. Permission comes with restrictions. You basically are signing a contract that says you believe the government can control how you exercise a right. The government had never had the power to do this but if you wish to acknowledge they do then by all means ask permission and pay for the privilege.
   Next they may decide you need to pay to vote, especially if you are registered as a party those in power wish to keep from gaining any power. If they can do that with a right that specifically says it shall not be infringed what’s to stop them?

9. TAKE CARE OUT THERE YA’ALL .. HAVE HAD A LTC FOR YEARS NOW IN TEXAS.
   STILL BELIEVE IN TRAINING . FREE OR PAY FOR .
   MAYBE DISCOUNT TRAINING , TAKE DOWN , CLEANING , OF WEAPON WHEN BUY ONE ??
   BACK GROUND CHECKS A MUST !
   STILL TRUE , EASIER TO CARRY A WEAPON IN YOU POCKET OR SIDE THAN A POLICE OFFICER
   REMEMBER YA PEPPER SPRAY AND WEAPON INSURANCE LIKE USCCA , OR SHELD
   SAY SAFE AND ALERT BEST YA CAN .

   • Background checks? Know how many people feel bavckground checks and spend time in jail.

     What’s the point? If the government does nothing to law breakers what is the point in observing laws the government enforces as they like?

10. Gun laws are unconstitutional and states wanting you to pay them for a right we all have is too? Whoa. This is crazy.

11. I carry concealed because most people love feeling safe in their self-imposed bubble of ignorance. What they don’t know can’t hurt them, unless they try to hurt me.

    • People do not carry because they don’t face reality, until reality takes them in its jaws, which is often to late for them.

12. If a poll tax to vote has been determined as unconstitutional then why is the $200 NFA tax not also unconstitutional? Has there ever been an attempt to change this? Just like paying for a ccw. Its a right not a privilege like driving.

13. The NFA was declared unconstitutional in the Miller case, but no one was there to argue it before the SCOTUS.
    It’s one of the cases the current court ought to review.

14. It’s No Brainer Obvious that any legislation, ordinance or mandate restricting the peoples RTKABA, is Infringement. The Government, at any level, is proscribed from Infringing upon the peoples Inherent and Constitutionally protected right, yet we’ve allowed that very thing to happen over and over.

    No where in the Constitution or Bill of Rights is there a mention of a “Right To Safety.” Park guy, you should have thrown that back in her teeth. She’s assuming a Right that isn’t granted, because it’s not a Right the Government can proactively enforce, grant or decree. The 2nd Amendment is the Right to your personal safety.

15. Shannon Watts
    @shannonrwatts
    When lawmakers close the door, @MomsDemand volunteers come in the window: “…volunteers are visiting Texas businesses, offering to help them post new signage required by the permitless carry law that would prevent people from bringing guns inside.”

    Sorry Shannon Dim Lightbulb, the signs you’re talking about only prevent law abiding citizens from bringing guns inside. Criminals, by definition, don’t obey the laws and will walk right by your sign when they come in to rob and kill the innocent people inside. I guess you would find comfort being gunned down by bad guys as long as you slipped your mortal coil knowing that those who die beside you were unable to defend their lives or the lives of their families? You’re a truly sick mind Shannon Watts.

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