Below are the details for a concealed carry permit class that Liberty on the Rocks is holding at our facilities on April 1st. No, it’s not an April Fools Day joke, we are really holding a gun class in the heart of Uptown Denver… at a great discount!

Here are the specifics from Liberty on the Rocks Red Rocks chapter president Jeff Sacco:

COLORADO CONCEALED CARRY PERMIT CLASS

Exercise your 2nd Amendment Rights! Take the first step in getting a concealed carry permit. This class meets the permitting requirements, and is being offered at half the price you’ll typically see. Through the generosity of Twistedwire Tactical, you’ll also be supporting your local (Red Rocks) Liberty on the Rocks chapter!

Date: April 1, 2012
Location: 727 E. 16th (Independence Institute)
Denver, CO 80203
Time: 1:00 – 5:00 p.m.
(registration begins at 12:30, class will begin promptly at 1:00)
Instructor: Kyle Peters, Twistedwire Tactical (NRA Certified)
Cost: Just $50 for confirmed reservations prior to 3/25/12, price will increase to $75 beginning 03/26/12.
Email RSVP’s to Sacco@LibertyOnTheRocks.org and you will receive a confirmation with your confirmed price.

Seating is limited! This class has been substantially discounted and approximately 20 seats have already been reserved. Cash or check will be required for admittance prior to entering the classroom the day of the event.

Help support Liberty on the Rocks (Red Rocks) and our cause to unite, educate, and activate individuals on the principles of individual rights, free markets, and limited government. This class will start you down the road to applying for a concealed handgun permit with your local sheriff’s office.

Upon completion of the class you will be given a Certificate that will allow you to apply for a Concealed Handgun Permit. No other class is required, however, your county Sheriff’s office will charge up to $100 for fingerprinting, pictures and processing the application, and the state charges $52.50 for the background check. For folks on a budget, you can take the class now, and apply for the permit in a few months (or even years) from now.

A Colorado Concealed Handgun Permit allows the permit holder to carry any handgun they choose almost anywhere in the state. The exceptions will be covered in class. You do not need to register any guns. The permit is valid for 5 years and is cheap to renew. You can find a list of states with “reciprocity” (each honors the others’ CCW permit) here: http://cbi.state.co.us/ic/Reciprocity.html.

The course is designed to meet the requirements for a Colorado CCW permit, and will cover such topics as basic safety, safe storage of firearms, carry and use of force laws, mindset, and more. No handguns are needed for this class, no firing range time will be involved.

I encourage all of our friends and their friends and family members to take advantage of this great offer. I doubt you will ever see a lower price and these permits may become harder to obtain in the future.

Jeff Sacco
Chapter President
Liberty On The Rocks (Red Rocks)

On Friday, March 9, Fordham Law School is holding an all-day symposium on the Second Amendment. The event is free, and open to the public. Or if you would prefer to pay, you can get CLE credits. Among the speakers are Gary Kleck, Nelson Lund, Robert Cottrol, Nicholas Johnson, Adam Winkler, and me.

After the event ends at 5 p.m., we are going to have an informal event to celebrate the publication of the new law school textbook Firearms Law & the Second Amendment; Regulation, Rights, and Policy. (By Nicholas J. Johnson , David B. Kopel , George A. Mocsary , Michael P. O’Shea.) Three of the four co-authors (Johnson, Kopel, and Mocsary) will be there. Our tentative plan is to hang around Fordham for a little while, and then proceed to P.J. Clark’s at 44 W. 63rd Street in Manhattan. VC readers are welcome to join us.

Or if you would just like to buy the book, you can order it from Amazon, or from the Aspen Publishers link, above.

Earlier today, Maryland federal district Benson Everett Legg decided the case of Woollard v. Sheridan. Plaintiffs on the case  are Robert Woollard and the Second Amendment Foundation. The lead attorney for plaintiffs is Alan Gura, the winning attorney in D.C. v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago.

As explained in the district court’s Dec. 2010 ruling, rejecting a motion to dismiss:

Plaintiff Woollard initially obtained a handgun carry permit after he was assaulted by an intruder in his home in 2002. The permit was renewed in 2005. At that time, the intruder had recently been released from prison, providing a “good and substantial reason” for Woollard to carry a firearm. In 2009, Woollard again sought to renew his permit so that he could carry a handgun for self defense. MSP Secretary Sheridan denied Woollard’s application, however, because Woollard failed to provide sufficient evidence “to support apprehended fear.”

At issue in the case is the Maryland statute which says that the Secretary of the State Police can issue a carry permit if  the applicant “has good and substantial reason to wear, carry, or transport a handgun, such as a finding that the permit is necessary as a reasonable precaution against apprehended danger.” Md.Code Ann., Pub. Safety § 5-306(a)(5)(ii).

In today’s decision on the merits, the “good and substantial reason” requirement was ruled to violate the Second Amendment. The court held that the Second Amendment right is not limited to self-defense in the home. It also includes the militia and hunting. None of the Second Amendment rights can logically be confined solely to the home: “In addition to self-defense, the right was also understood to allow for militia membership and hunting. To secure these rights, the Second Amendment‘s protections must extend beyond the home: neither hunting nor militia training is a household activity, and ‘self-defense has to take place wherever [a] person happens to be’.”

The internal quotation, by the way, is from Eugene Volokh, Implementing the Right to Keep and Bear Arms for Self-Defense: An Analytical Framework and a Research Agenda, 56 UCLA L. Rev. 1443 (2009). Based on judicial citations, the Volokh article appears to be by far the most influential post-Heller  article on the Second Amendment.

The Maryland carry license law was not “narrowly tailored,” says the Woollard opinion. Moreover, “A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights.” Rather, “The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”

The case is headed to the Fourth Circuit, which has a mixed record on Second Amendment issues. From there, Woollard could be the case in which the Supreme Court chooses to tell recalcitrant lower federal courts that Heller and McDonald really do mean what they say: that the Second Amendment includes the right to carry, albeit not in “sensitive places,” and the government may, if it wishes, require that carry be open rather than concealed.

The SAF press release is here, and a terse AP story is here. Congratulations to Alan Gura and to SAF President Alan Gottlieb!

A few weeks ago, the New York Times reported that the NY Police Department was working with the Department of Defense on a remote firearms detector. According to the article, the detectors are  presently effective at a 3 to 5 meter range at finding guns that are being carried concealed. The objective is to improve the detectors so that they work from a distance of 25 meters.

Commentators, what do you think of this? Does is raise Fourth Amendment concerns? Second Amendment issues? Any other constitutional or policy questions?

According to the New York Times, the answer seems to be “yes.” An article in yesterday’s Times by Michael Luo collects some anecdotes about misbehavior by a few licensees in North Carolina. The Times article has some numbers in it, and it provides the number of North Carolinians with carry permits (240,000). After a thorough search of North Carolina records, the Times finds that about 1% of permitees were convicted of something, other than a traffic offense, over the past five years. Of these 2,400 convictions, by far the largest group is “nearly 900 permit holders were convicted of drunken driving, a potentially volatile circumstance given the link between drinking and violence.”

“Drunk driving” (which, I would guess, the Times uses as a shorthand for lesser offenses such as driving while impaired) is a serious crime in itself. But just because a woman has three glasses of wine with dinner at a restaurant, and then gets caught in a police checkpoint, doesn’t make her some “potentially volatile” person who is going to murder somebody in an inebriated rage.

In any large population (e.g., 240,000) there will be at least a small percentage who over a period of time are found guilty of some crimes. This does not mean that that population as a whole is dangerous. It would have been useful to compare the conviction rates of North Carolinians who have carry licenses with the convictions rates of those who do not. I suspect that the non-licensee crime rate would be much higher, especially for violent gun crimes.

In a 2009 article in the Connecticut Law Review, I collected data from Minnesota, Michigan, Ohio, Louisiana, Texas, and Florida. (The state data begin on page 564 of the article.) The data show that concealed carry licensees are much more law-abiding than the general population, and that the rate of gun misuse of any sort (let alone having something to do with violence in  public place) is less than one in one thousand.

Instapundit collects some other responses to the Times‘ effort to foment hysteria and prejudice against the persons who exercise the constitutional right to carry firearms for lawful protection.

[This post was corrected in response to reader comments, including the fact that I wrongly wrote that the Times had not reported the total number of licensees.]

Regarding Eugene Volokh’s post below about an NYU L. Rev. article, “The People” of the Second Amendment: Citizenship and the Right To Bear Arms. I just scanned the article, and there appears to be only a single footnote which directly cites any state statutes from before 1800. Note 125, accurately cites standard statutory compilations from Massachusetts and Connecticut for laws against selling firearms to Indians. Although the author is apparently unaware that by 1661 (Connecticut) and 1688 (Massachusetts) the laws were changed to allow gun sales (and even gun carrying in towns) by friendly Indians. The article suffers very severely from its near-exclusive reliance on secondary sources for the pre-1800 period, especially since some of those sources are highly tendentious.

To summarize the information from Chapter 3 of my forthcoming textbook Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy (Aspen Publishers, available in late Jan. 2012) regarding American law pre-1800:

Women: No restrictions. Of course they did not serve in the militia. Laws requiring “householders” (whether or not they were in the militia) to have arms were common, and these usually included a woman who was the head of the house (e.g., a widow).

Free blacks: Some states had no restrictions, some states had bans on their owning guns. Free blacks served in some state militia, not in some other states, and in some states policies changed depending on military necessity. They were excluded from the federal militia by the Second Militia Act of 1792.

Slaves: Several states banned gun ownership, or allowed ownership only with the master’s permission.

Poor whites: To claim that they were excluded from gun ownership or from militia service is absurd. There were absolutely no property or wealth restrictions on gun ownership, nor on service in the militia. To the contrary, many states had programs to supply poor people with guns (“public arms”) for militia service, if they could not afford their own. Further, the laws requiring householders to be armed often required that the household provide arms to adult male servants. State laws also required that when an indentured servant finished his or her term of service, the master must provide the former servant with “freedom dues” so that the servant could begin independent life. The freedom dues were specified set of goods; in Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina, freedom dues for male servants included a firearm. In short, the state laws of the 17th and 18th centuries in America were generally prescriptive about gun ownership by poor people, and the prescriptions were to put guns into the hands of the poor.

The author of the NYU article asserts that “arms bearing was considered congruent to voting, holding public office, or serving on juries.” That’s incorrect for “bearing” in the sense of carrying a gun for personal use, since there were no wealth, sex, age, or citizenship restrictions on carrying. And the claim is even more incorrect if “bearing” is meant in the restrictive sense of “bearing for militia service.” Militia laws always mandated service by all males (except, sometimes Blacks or Indians) in a certain age range. Period. The only exemptions were for specified professions (e.g., clergy). Militia duty was generally required starting at age 16 or 18 (which was before voting eligibility). Indeed, during the end of the 18th century and the early 19th century, one of the standard,successful, arguments for broadening the franchise by eliminating the property requirement for voting was that anyone who served in the militia deserved to vote. E.g., “Let every man who fights or pays, exercise his just and equal right in their election.” Thomas Jefferson letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816.

Catholics: In Maryland, temporarily barred from gun ownership during the French & Indian War.

Dissenters: During the Revolution, there were plenty of instances of confiscating guns (sometimes with compensation) for militia use from people who would not take a loyalty oath to the new nation, or who would not serve in the militia (this included plenty of religious pacifists in Pennsylvania). During the early theocratic days in Massachusetts, 75 supporters of the religious dissident Anne Hutchinson were disarmed.

The author’s thesis is that illegal aliens and legal non-resident aliens should be allowed to own guns. Part of his argument is to construct and then criticize the supposedly historical “gendered,and class-stratified understanding of persons permitted to own guns.” The author could have made a stronger historical argument for his position if he had accurately described the gun laws of 17th and 18th century America.

That’s the title of my new law review article, currently in the editing process at the Charleston Law Review. A draft is available at SSRN, and comments are welcome. The final part of the article suggests how the history might inform our modern understanding of Second Amendment rights.

I wanted to alert my readers to a media release Dave Kopel sent out to Second Amendment friends this past Wednesday. And as a friend of conceal carry and gun rights myself, I have to give a big thanks to Dave for all his hard work. (yet again)

U.S. House passes law to allow Coloradoans to carry handguns in other
states. Independence Institute’s David Kopel testified to Congress in
favor of the bill

On November 16th, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 272 to 154 to
pass H.R. 822, a bill which creates national reciprocity for concealed
handgun carry licenses. Colorado’s four Republican Representatives are
all co-sponsors.

The bill now moves to the Senate, where a similar bill in 2009 won a
majority, but was defeated by the filibuster. Senators Udall and
Bennet voted in favor of that bill.

If the bill becomes law, Colorado residents who have a concealed
handgun carry permit could carry a handgun in all other jurisdictions
which issue concealed handgun permits. This would be everywhere except
Illinois and the District of Columbia. When carrying in another state,
Coloradoans would have to comply with the all the rules of the other
state, just as Coloradoans who drive in other states have to obey the
traffic laws there.

Independence Institute Research Director David Kopel testified in
support of the bill at a Sept. 13 hearing of the House Judiciary
Committee’s subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security.

Kopel’s testimony explained why the bill is a proper exercise of
Congress’s authority to enact legislation to protect national
constitutional rights, such as the right to interstate travel, and the
right to bear arms. The 14th Amendment was added to Constitution in
1868 for the intended purpose of granting Congress the power to take
action when states infringe “the Privileges or Immunities of citizens
of the United States.” The history of the 14th Amendment shows that
Congress was particularly concerned about state infringements of the
Second Amendment and of the right to travel.

Kopel’s testimony also presented data showing that concealed handgun
permittees are much more law-abiding than the general population, and
there is no reason for legislators to fear that permitees–who have
been proven to be law-abiding in their home states–will turn into
criminals when they cross a state border. The legislation was
necessary, Kopel said, because of a handful of states, including New York
and New Jersey, refuse to allow non-residents to apply for carry
permits, and also refuse to honor permits from other states.

Kopel’s written testimony is available at
http://davekopel.org/Testimony/HR822-Kopel.pdf

By a vote of 272 to 154. (The vote on the motion to recommit was 161 to 263). On the final vote, 44 Democrats voted in favor, and 7 Republicans voted against. H.R. 822 now goes to the Senate. In the previous Congress, a broader bill on interstate carry was narrowly defeated by a filibuster led by Sen. Charles Schumer. Of course whether the bill ever comes up for a vote in the Senate is up to Majority Leader Harry Reid.

In September, I testified before the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security, in support of the bill. My testimony focused mainly on the Congress’s constitutional authority to pass the bill under the powers granted by section 5 of the 14th Amendment. Among the explicit purposes of the 14th Amendment was to give Congress the power to enact legislation protecting the right to interstate travel, which is one of the Privileges or Immunities of citizens of the United States. My written testimony is here. A video of the subcommittee hearing is here. And here’s short podcast on the subject, with Cato.

HT to Shall Not Be Questioned for coverage of the day’s voting, in which all hostile amendments were defeated.

Because of Dave Kopel’s dedication and hard work over the last couple decades, there are hundreds, if not thousands of people in the Washington DC and Chicago areas who would have been shot and killed, but instead will live full and fruitful lives. These people can thank folks like Dave Kopel who helped shape the decisions in McDonald v. Chicago and DC v. Heller – where handguns and the self-defense they bring, became legal once again. New evidence has surfaced that shows the crime rate has plummeted in both cities since the monumental Supreme Court decisions came down. Therefore, many people owe their lives to the work Second Amendment scholars like Dave Kopel did to help turn the tide in favor of gun (self-defense) rights.

Thanks Dave! Our cities are much safer places thanks to you.