Constitutional Carry "Clarification" - Granite Grok

Constitutional Carry “Clarification”

holstered-gun1Last week in a post titled “It’s kind of like Constitutional Carry” I reported an observation from that weeks GrokTalk! in which Evan Nappen noted: the New Hampshire State Supreme Court Ruling (On what the definition of a loaded gun is in RSA 159:4) got us closer to Constitutional carry.

My actual words were, “…we are happy to report that with a bit of a twist, New Hampshire now has, sort of, kind of, …almost, constitutional carry.”

It is not ‘Constitutional Carry,’ which is the right of any law abiding citizen to carry and conceal a loaded weapon with a chambered round, without a government issued ‘permit,’ but it is a great step in the right direction and here’s why.

Incrementalism works.

People really are conservative by nature.  They are creatures of habit and routine.  So in most cases people are averse to dramatic or abrupt changes of large scale, which is why intimidation and force are often required to impose them with any haste; which is why governments that like to go large do all they can to create the mechanisms of intimidation and force that will allow them to do whatever they want, and be incompetent at all of it while making you pay for it, without fear of any meaningful opposition to their power or inept use or abuse of it.

This has been, for the most part, the relationship between people and their rulers, which is why the second amendment and the idea for constitutional carry are so important.  Paul Revere rode because the government (The British) were coming for their guns.  Had they succeeded, there would have been no revolution.  Consider that as the Liberal Public Relations Machine keeps turning out the political equivalent of anti-gun road-shows regurgitating focus-group tested terms and phrases like ‘gun violence,’ designed to allow more control of law abiding gun owners while doing absolutely nothing about violence.

But back to my point.

Where force or intimidation are not used, an abrupt policy change can create a catalyst for political backlash leaving the policy agenda stalled, or even reversed, and those seeking it out of office.  There are numerous factors to that process most of which the left is better at than the rest of us, but they are better because of their application of incrementalism over decades; I’m not going to get into that again here.  My point is that moving in the right direction in smaller steps is often the better way to achieve the desired goal.  Sometimes you have to be patient and speak to the best of what you have achieved (or been given) rather than act derisive about the inadequacy of the “improvement.”

I’m not saying anyone has done that, I’m just pointing out that it happens, a lot, too often, and it damages our shared goals and divides the forces seeking our common interests.

If your goal is constitutional carry, and it is an issue your opponents will grind their axes on at great length–and this one is–trying to pass it straight out will meet with a significant political and media campaign in opposition.  One we would likley lose today, or next year when an opposition government expended political capitol to overturn it.  They would, and we know it.  But what happened with the New Hampshire State Supreme Court two weeks ago sows the field for selling constitutional carry in the future as a reasonable right for any law-abiding citizen to have.

Consider.

The State Supreme court, a body typically used to the advantage of our political opponents has ruled that according to existing New Hampshire State Statute…

It is legal to carry concealed without a permit in New Hampshire as long as the gun is “not loaded.”  Now it has always been legal to carry an unloaded weapon concealed but now “not loaded” means you can have the ammunition anywhere on or near you as long as it is not actually in the weapon.  That is a huge improvement and one with significant benefit to the goal of constitutional carry.

Two years from now assuming the nutty liberals have not pounded their chests and beat their drums long enough to convince a majority of elected representatives to dance widdershins around their anti-self defense bonfire to the tune of “this new kind of unloaded permit-less “carry” is the bane of our well-being and should be overturned, banned, or banished,” we will have had two (just as an example) years during which–more likley than not–the criminal landscape in our state will not have been altered by it.

Yes, you still need to take two steps to load and chamber a round so it is not constitutional carry, but any law abiding citizen can already carry a loaded weapon in the open, and if it only takes two steps to load a concealed weapon without a permit–which is then in the open and legal–why not just stop wasting time on statutes whose only purpose should be to define when a law abiding citizen loses that right instead of trying to micromanage variables that serve no functional purpose in law or order?

The State Supreme court has not just turned the soil but has planted and fertilized the seeds.  If we can manage to just say thank you and bide our time, we’ll have what we want because we technically have it already.  All that is left is the pithy radio spots, bright friendly flyers, an attractive spokes-model, and some hard data that demonstrates what we already know.   Anti-gun laws have no impact on people who do not follow the law.  It is therefore counter productive to turn the rest of us into victims under the guise of preventing gun-violence when it will do nothing of the sort.  The liberal campaign is nothing more than ad copy designed to accomplish what the British had in mind so many years ago–to disarm the populace leaving them helpless against the a government desiring a monopoly on force and intimidation over it’s subjects.

The left is looking for Subjects to rule, and they know they cannot turn you into one until they have made gun ownership impossible, impractical, expensive, socially unacceptable, or simply illegal.  They will do it one step at a time, so we have to take it back one step at a time.  And the recent New Hampshire Supreme Court decision on the definition of loaded, is a huge step in the right direction and a significant step in turning evey law abiding citizen into modern day Paul Revere’s.

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