Thanks to your overwhelming opposition, the NC Criminal Justice Education Training Standards Commission (NCCJETSC) and the Criminal Justice Standards Division have backed down: there will be no “Pre-Delivery” report requiring CHP instructors to give advance notice of classes, no “Post-Delivery Report,” and no gun owner registry aka a “roster” of students. Instead, instructor performance will be tracked through training certificate numbers currently held by the State Bureau of Investigation. In other words, there will be no new restrictions on concealed carry training or permits.

A potential future problem

Concealed carry instructor Harry Morse has done a good job of helping to muster opposition to proposed restrictions. Unfortunately, however, it appears there is trouble in paradise. At the meeting he was recruiting instructors to join his new “NC Concealed Carry Instructors Association.”

While that in itself isn’t a problem, the positions taken by his new “association” are. Specifically, at the 11/15 meeting, Morse called for more restrictions on concealed handgun permits – specifically, he asked the commission to make recurrent training for CHP renewals mandatory, rather than at the discretion of the sheriff, as it has always been. (Most don’t require it.) He also asked for photographs to be mandatory for CHP permits.

Despite his demand for additional expenses and burdens for permit-holders who would be subjected to unnecessary training, we will give Harvey the benefit of the doubt and will not yet conclude that his proposal is designed to make more money for instructors at the expense of permit-holders.

Fortunately, Morse was told by the commission that it lacked the authority to make the changes, and that they would have to be made by the legislature. And you may rest assured that as North Carolina’s only no-compromise gun rights organization, Grass Roots North Carolina will make sure any such legislation is dead on arrival.

Although Morse apparently claims to represent all CHP instructors, heading his emails to the 2,600 instructor list he got from NCDOJ with “The voice for NC CCH instructors,” instructors we have spoken to are deeply offended, believing that Morse’s comments to NCCJETSC were made under color of representing concealed carry instructors who were neither consulted nor asked for representation.

Anyone who receives a solicitation to join Morse’s group should realize that “compromise” seems to be very much a part of its mission. Perhaps people should ask Morse where his “association” stands on constitutional or permitless concealed carry such as contained in House Bill 189, which GRNC helped to draft and introduce.