NC: North Carolina Repeals Gun Registration

Gun registration was never popular in North Carolina.  The only county that required that guns be registered was Durham County, but that law was passed in 1935, and had been grandfathered in when state preemption of gun laws was codified in 1995.   Just because the law only applied to Durham County did not mean that it did not affect other people in the state or around the nation.  The law required guns to be registered.   If you were passing through Durham County, and possessed guns that were not registered in the County, you could have been charged with a crime.

It does not appear that many were.   Like many antique laws, this one acted as an old, out of date, rusty landmine, waiting for the unsuspecting victim in just the wrong circumstances to go off.  The landmine has been disarmed.   Much of the work required to repeal the law came from Grass Roots North Carolina (GRNC), a local nonprofit group that supports the right to keep and bear arms.

The registry consisted entirely of paper forms in alphabetical order.   It is claimed that it was never put into digital format.   As someone who has dealt with those issues, I can affirm that converting old paper forms to digital media can be time consuming and expensive.      

Paul Valone, president of GRNC, is pushing to have the old records destroyed.   From carolinajournal.com:

 “We’ve got an alert going out right now to have people contact the county commission to demand these records be destroyed,” said Paul Valone, president of Grass Roots North Carolina, a nonprofit gun rights organization.

 Repeal of the registration system is one of a continuing series of legislative wins for second amendment supporters nationwide.   In spite of support for more restrictive gun laws in the old media and vast sums spent by billionaire politicians, public support for gun control continues to drop.

©2014 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
Link to Gun Watch