North Carolina has seen the deadly consequences of loosening gun laws | Opinion
One year ago, lawmakers in the North Carolina General Assembly passed Senate Bill 41 into law, repealing North Carolina’s life-saving pistol purchase permit system. This system closed the background check loophole on private handgun sales. Without it, North Carolina residents who purchase handguns from private sellers at gun shows, online, and in their community can now avoid the background checks that are required when purchasing from federally-licensed retailers.
One year later, and we’ve seen the deadly consequences. According to The News and Observer, the student accused of killing UNC Professor Zijie Yan appears to have circumvented a background check by purchasing from a private seller several months after lawmakers passed SB41. Had the pistol purchasing permit system remained the law, his student visa status would have barred him from purchasing the firearm.
The UNC shooting is tragically not an isolated incident. While we don’t have the full statistics for North Carolina yet, the American Journal of Public Health tells us that in Missouri deaths by firearms increased substantially after the state repealed its handgun permit law. Conversely, when Connecticut implemented a permit law like the one our General Assembly repealed, their gun deaths declined.
Decades of data showed us that North Carolina’s pistol purchasing permitting system was saving lives, and these data were covered by the media and shared in legislative testimony during committee hearings — yet our lawmakers passed this dangerous law anyway.
Senate Bill 41 was also supposed to create a safe firearm storage awareness campaign, educating the public about safe storage and distributing gun locks around the state. However, the bill appropriated no money for the campaign, rendering it an empty promise. Fortunately, Gov. Roy Cooper filled in the funding void, using other funds to launch the NC S.A.F.E. program, and subsequently a federal grant was used to help fund the program. But NC S.A.F.E’s program funding runs out in early 2025.
This safe storage program is especially important since there was an immediate surge in handgun sales following the passage of SB41: a jump from 2,016 handgun sales in the month before SB41 passed to 52,532 handgun sales in the month after. According to an analysis by The Trace, this is likely an undercount because it only measures sales made through the federal system, not sales from private sellers, like the purchase the alleged shooter at UNC-Chapel Hill made.
When N.C. legislators come back to Raleigh this month, I hope they will consider the impact of the tens of thousands of extra handguns in circulation since SB41 passed — the ones tracked by the federal system that we know about, and those that we now cannot track because they were purchased privately, by people with an interest in avoiding background checks.
Our legislators must pass real solutions to violence. That includes robust, recurring funding for community violence intervention programs, which have been shown to reduce community violence and are urgently needed in communities around our state, as well as recurring funding for the safe storage awareness campaign they committed to when they passed SB41. And, they must not further loosen any of the remaining restrictions that we have on firearms, like our concealed carry permitting system.
Sara Smith is organizing director of the North Carolinians Against Gun Violence Action Fund.
