BELLEVUE, WA – A recent report by ABC News that gun control groups are vowing to “double down” against incoming President Donald Trump if he pursues national concealed carry reciprocity only proves anti-gunners are more interested in citizen disarmament than in public safety, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said in response.
“National concealed carry reciprocity simply would mean American citizens would no longer leave their right of self-defense at a state border,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “The gun prohibition lobby needs to come clean and admit they don’t care if law-abiding citizens can’t defend themselves while traveling. They’re not interested in public safety, only public disarmament.”
A national reciprocity bill passed the U.S. House in 2017, but was never brought up in the Senate, and Democrats have opposed the idea. Now, however, with Capitol Hill under Republican control, and Trump on record as vowing to sign legislation if it hits his desk, anti-gunners—including Everytown for Gun Safety and the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence—are promising a fight to keep people traveling from one state to another vulnerable to criminal attack.
“The gun ban crowd can couch their arguments any way they want,” Gottlieb observed, “but when you boil it down, what they really want is for good people to be vulnerable to violent crime. Anti-gunners argue that reciprocity will make it easier for criminals to cross state lines, but that doesn’t pass the smell test because criminals are already doing that.
“Any notion that legally-armed Americans are somehow a threat to public safety when they journey to another state is manufactured paranoia,” he said.
“And,” Gottlieb added, “when armed citizens go to other states, they must obey that state’s gun laws. The argument that states will see their own gun laws eroded by reciprocity is yet another myth invented by anti-gunners to dissuade people from supporting reciprocity. Each state’s laws would remain intact, and they know it.”