We all (with very few exceptions) want to reduce gun violence in North Carolina but quickly diverge when discussing how to go about doing so. Our state is consistently in the top 20 states for violent crime, being No. 12 in 2022, with 21% more gun deaths than the nation at large. This chaos is seen in major cities like Greensboro, Durham, and Fayetteville and in smaller ones like Wadesboro, Lumberton, and Rocky Mount. But the priorities of the state’s progressive movement are hard to square with their insistence that they want to reduce overall gun violence.
When Republicans in the state House introduced HB 5, the NC Constitutional Carry Act, which would allow citizens who are otherwise allowed to own guns to conceal them without a permit, progressive activist organizations quickly mobilized.
Mom’s Demand Action NC told their followers on Facebook page to “Contact your NC legislators to let them know they should keep NC’s current concealed carry law.” North Carolinians Against Gun Violence, among others, also spoke out against the idea, saying, “What would we lose if concealed carry permitting was repealed? It would make North Carolinians less safe. Period!”
The state Senate then filed a similar bill, SB 50, Freedom to Carry NC, amplifying the issue further. House sponsors of HB 5 had been worried that Senate leadership would kill their bill if it crossed over. But with Senate Leader Phil Berger co-sponsoring SB 50, it looks like the bill has a good chance of passing in both chambers.
There are 29 other states who already have permitless carry, and advocates claim it has not had any negative effects on violent crime data. The groups opposed to permitless carry dispute this and claim criminals would have more guns to steal from homes and vehicles.
Opposing gun control where it matters
Whether or not permitless carry for law-abiding citizens slightly increases gun violence or not, I can’t help but notice how progressives, at least some of them, often wink at a much bigger source of gun violence — the illegal possession of guns by violent felons.
The data is very clear that the most likely person to commit violent crime with a gun is someone who has a criminal history of committing violence. In 2022, the US Sentencing Commission published data that “The vast majority of firearms offenders (88.8%) sentenced under §2K2.1 were prohibited from possessing a firearm,” and “Firearms offenders were more than twice as likely to have a prior conviction for a violent offense compared to all other offenders (60.6% compared to 29.0%).”
A 2011 US Department of Justice study found that, of those arrested for gun violence in Newark, New Jersey, “over 59 percent had violence and weapons arrest history.” Similar studies focusing on other cities show a pattern — the people most likely to commit gun violence are those who have committed acts of violence before.
Doing everything we can to keep guns out of their hands would do more to prevent gun violence than anything else and is the very reason that laws are on the books to do so. This should be an area of agreement for those on all sides, but instead progressive DAs and activists frequently back weaker enforcement of laws prohibiting felons from possessing guns.
This has been an issue for years. Charlotte Observer found that in Durham, “From 2014 through 2018, prosecutors dismissed nearly 58 percent of all weapons charges in the county.”
At that time, in 2019, Durham DA Satana Deberry released a statement to the Charlotte Observer saying, “When that charge is filed alone, the DA’s office considers whether a person is truly a danger to our community, which is not indicated by his or her status as a person with a prior felony conviction.”
What those considerations are were not made clear. But the man highlighted in the Observer’s piece, Ronald Lloyd, had a history of violence extending to his teen years, including two dozen gun crimes, mostly dismissed by prosecutors. He robbed people at gun point, even shooting at their feet to intimidate them, and dragged another man half a mile with his Jeep, but the Durham DA’s office hadn’t considered him enough of a risk to the community to pursue all the charges. He’s now in jail on a later gun possession and is due to be released in early March.
In Charlotte, over the same period, the Observer found 68% of charges for felons in possession of a firearm were dismissed. When four Charlotte police officers were killed and five others injured last year in an ambush, WCNC reported on the extensive criminal violence in the accused perpetrator’s background — and that many of those charges over the years had been dismissed.
Deberry’s bad press here hasn’t ended. WRAL investigated her twice in recent months, after receiving many tips that she was often not showing up to work and that she was still routinely dismissing cases against felons illegally in possession of firearms.
WRAL obtained emails between an assistant DA and a police officer, who was inquiring why an arrest he made for “possession of a firearm by a felon” was dropped. The assistant DA openly admitted that “DA Deberry also has a particular philosophy/policy when it comes to firearm by felon charges that are not accompanied by violence or threats of violence. In keeping with that policy, I dismissed this case.”
WRAL looked into the criminal record of the person whose case was dropped, and they had, in fact, been convicted for violent offenses in the past. So, apparently, as long as the felon was not caught in the act of violence at that moment, it didn’t matter if the person illegally possessing a firearm had a history of violence.
Lest one think that Deberry’s failure to prosecute was due to her habit of missing work, she made her intent clear at a conference on “Reimagining the 21st-Century Prosecutor,” where one of her fellow panelists, Vermont’s State Attorney Sarah George, said, “The most powerful thing that elected prosecutors can do is not charge.”
After acknowledging homicide increases in Durham, and blaming them on things like poverty, inequality, over-incarceration, law-abiding citizens buying guns, and police officers targeting minority communities, Deberry said, “We have to stop pretending reform is the real threat to public safety and recognize how over-reliance on prosecution and incarceration may make us less safe.”
Wake County DA Lorrin Freeman, on the other hand, told WRAL she has a “zero drop” policy, prosecuting every case of this kind. Unsurprisingly, Freeman, while a Democrat, has come under heavy attack by progressive activist groups for refusing to drop charges and artificially lower incarceration rates.
If North Carolina is going to make real progress in lowering gun violence, we will need to prosecute and incarcerate violent felons illegally carrying firearms, as data shows these are the people most likely to commit future acts of violence with guns. Fighting the ability of law-abiding citizens to carry guns only ignores the problem.
