Grass Roots North Carolina, P.O. Box 10665, Raleigh, NC 27605, 877-282-0939, www.GRNC.org
Black advocacy groups put politics
ahead of those they claim to represent
You will never go broke betting on the hypocrisy of the left. In this case, the NAACP, NC Black Alliance and other advocacy groups claiming to represent Black Americans are backing (if you can believe this) a Jim Crow law.
At issue is the pistol purchase permit repeal being considered by the NC legislature – a law sheriffs have long used to deny permits to those they deem not of “good moral character” which, when the law was passed in 1919, meant the applicant was Black.
Follow their logic (or perhaps illogic) carefully: They have somehow twisted the pretzel to insist that repealing a Jim Crow law is “racist.”
In a press conference touted in a hit piece by WRAL-TV, the NAACP, the NC Black Alliance, and others railed against the repeal, alleging that black communities would be disproportionately affected by increased “gun violence” and rejecting (but not repudiating) the Jim Crow origins of the law.
Ignoring, for a moment, the irony of supposed advocates for minorities opposing repeal of a law widely acknowledged by scholarly journals to be a 1919 Jim Crow law,1, 2 opponents carefully ignored evidence that permit denials are racially biased even to this day.
A 2021 paper in UNC School of Law’s North Carolina Law Review, entitled “Misfire: How the North Carolina Pistol Purchase Permit System Misses the Mark of Constitutional Muster and Effectiveness,”3 documents that in Wake County alone, 23.54% of black applicants were denied permits between 2015 and 2020, but only 8.37% of whites – a rejection rate for blacks which is three times higher than whites. How many of those rejections were made using the arbitrary “good moral character” requirement remains unknown.
The measure of the groups’ hypocrisy, of course, is that left-leaning advocacy groups have taken to calling for “equity” – namely, equality not of opportunity, but of outcome. And yet, when faced with clear inequity with respect to exercising civil rights for self-protection, they reverse position. If we were talking about lack of equity in prison incarceration rates, rest assured they would be screaming bloody murder.
Their position that repeal would increase violent crime rests on the ludicrous notion that criminals responsible for “gun violence” are inexplicably obeying the purchase permit law, the permits for which are untraceable slips of paper. Given that most North Carolinians don’t even know a purchase permit is required for a private transfer, it’s a safe bet that when gang members sell each other firearms, no purchase permits are used.
Opponents also ignore the fact that because pistol purchase permits are untraceable and valid for five years, it is entirely possible for an applicant to obtain one, commit a crime which disqualifies him from firearm ownership, and then use the purchase permit to bypass the computerized National Instant Background Check System when (illegally) buying a gun.
In fact, a 2014 report by the North Carolina Sheriff’s Association found that in Mecklenburg County, approximately 38% of purchase permits issued might be held by ineligible people. In some counties, they found the rate as high as 50%.4 By contrast, repealing the purchase permit system will ensure that background checks from federally licensed dealers will be done at the time and point of sale, rather than up to five years prior.
Unfortunately, we are witnessing yet another example of advocacy groups for minorities putting politics ahead of the interests of the constituencies they purport to represent.
References:
- David B. Kopel, The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? Prometheus Books, 1992.
- Cramer, Clayton E., “North Carolina's Permit to Purchase Law: The Rumble Seat of Gun Control Laws?” April 4, 2016. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2759091 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2759091
- Nicholas Gallo, “Misfire: How the North Carolina Pistol Purchase Permit System Misses the Mark of Constitutional Muster and Effectiveness,” North Carolina Law Review 99, No. 2, Article 7, UNC School of Law, January 1, 2021, https://scholarship.law.unc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6824&context=nclr
- “Pistol Purchase Permit Revocations: A Report to the General Assembly,” North Carolina Sheriff’s Association, March 31, 2014, Revised August 5, 2014.
