CHAPEL HILL, N.C. – After the August 28th shooting on UNC’s campus, there were calls for action from the legislature both on campus:
“I am sick of thoughts and prayers, I want bills and I want change,” said one UNC student at a rally on campus in the days following the shooting.
And in Raleigh:
“Legislators need to act like our lives depend on it, because they do,” said another UNC student at a rally outside the General Assembly.
But it’s a lot quieter on campus now, at least in regards to gun violence. There are no more protests or calls on the General Assembly. It’s quiet on Jones Street too. The legislative session ended last month.
But the General Assembly was in session, and able to pass new bills, for months after the shooting. State lawmakers passed bills on abortion, redistricting, education, and a new budget, but not gun control.
“Nothing’s happened in the General Assembly that would make any bit of difference to trying to prevent another incident like the August 28th shooting,” said State Senator Graig Meyer.
Meyer is a Democrat who represents Orange County, home to UNC.
Representative Frank Sossamon is a Republican from Henderson, North Carolina, a small town in Vance County just south of the Virginia border. He just finished his first year in the General Assembly.
He says there have been ongoing discussions among his party since the August 28th shooting.
“There hasn’t been any bills per say, but I know there is some work sort of behind the scenes for what we can do that will be reasonable, that will be effective,” Sossamon says.
Meyer says that Democrats have introduced gun bills this year, but those bills have been rejected by Republicans.
“We have bills that have been introduced that would create red flag protections, make it more difficult to get access to dangerous weapons, provide better safety for the storage of guns, which isn’t necessarily about this case, but would prevent lots of accidental gun deaths,” Meyer said. “We tried to run amendments on gun bills this year to put all of those into place, and they were defeated by the Republicans every single time.”
In March, Senate and House Democrats introduced omnibus bills that would have required a permit to purchase an assault rifle or long gun and created a three day waiting period to purchase a gun, among other regulations.
Jeffery Welty, an expert in criminal law and procedure from the UNC School of Government, believes a three day waiting period could keep guns out of the hands of people going through a crisis, but it could also harm others.
“If you’re a person who has an immediate need for a firearm and what folks often talk about as somebody who’s a domestic violence victim is moving out and is afraid of their former partner and wants to get a firearm for self-defense, that waiting three days might be too long,” Welty said.
Meyer was one of the sponsors of the Senate version of the bill. Both bills were referred to their respective Rules Committees, where they would die, no action ever being taken on either of them.
Democrats also introduced several other gun control bills around the same time that would have allowed law enforcement to destroy confiscated guns, among other regulations. The bills also all died in committee.
Sossamon says that he does not recall the bills, but that bipartisan support is important in cases like these.
“I’m sure there have been some and I can’t recall any from memory or name any particular titles of the bill,” Sossamon said. “But I think sometimes, you know, having bipartisan support at the very beginning is extremely important because it shows that there is a level of support on both sides, and that would be a good thing to happen.”
One gun bill that did pass this session was a Republican-led bill that repealed pistol permits in our state. Republicans overrode Governor Roy Cooper’s veto of the bill and passed it into law in March.
Sossamon voted in favor of the bill.
“I voted in favor of the bill primarily because the history of that bill is a Jim Crow bill,” Sossamon said.
According to the Duke Center for Firearms Law, claims that North Carolina’s pistol permit law, originally passed in 1919, was purely racist “don’t hold up to close historical scrutiny.”
While Sossamon said he supports taking guns away from the mentally ill, he admits he’s not aware of any talks among his party about potential legislation on it.
“I think since most of the mass shootings have mental illness in that shooting in some way, then I would address it from that angle,” Sossamon said.
Democrats proposed their own red flag law in March. It would have allowed law enforcement to confiscate the guns of anyone proven to be a harm to themselves or others.
“I don’t understand why anyone is opposed to red flag laws and a red flag law is probably the single policy that would have had the most likely chance of stopping the murder that happened on this campus,” Meyer said.
But Sossamon says it’s not that simple.
“And sometimes, as we all know, the devil’s in the details, and sometimes if the details can be adjusted, then a law like that can pass,” Sossamon said.
This year was the fourth consecutive year that Democrats introduced a red flag law in the state legislature, and the fourth consecutive year that it failed.
That might be because North Carolina has a long history of expanding gun rights, according to Welty.
“They tend to generally expand rather than to restrict gun rights in the state,” Welty said.
But many other states have passed their own red flag laws. Florida passed a red flag law after the Parkland shooting in 2018, and is one of the states that uses the law the most. In 2021 alone, 2,586 petitions for extreme risk protection orders were filed in Florida.
21 states and the District of Columbia already have some version of a red flag law. North Carolina is one of 13 states where it has been proposed but not adopted.
Florida, a Republican led state, passed several gun control bills after the Parkland shooting, like a universal background check law. It also instituted a three day waiting period to buy guns.
Times have changed since 2018 however. Earlier this year, Florida repealed its concealed carry permit requirement. The Texas legislature has not implemented any gun control policies since its own school shooting tragedy in Uvalde in 2022.
“That’s the lesson of Texas,” Welty said. “I mean, people on both sides have really strong feelings about gun policy. And sometimes a tragic event can catalyze people to change the way they think about things a little bit, but not always.”
But Meyer says North Carolina has not been able to pass more gun control because of Republicans.
“The Republican Party is completely opposed to any type of restrictions on guns,” Meyer said. “They seem to prefer to have violence and murder rather than having any type of restriction on firearms.”
In response, Sossamon said that kind of thinking prevents bipartisan action from happening.
“It’s gonna be hard for people with that kind of opinion to talk to anybody and try to get something done,” Sossamon said.
But Meyer’s still not confident that anything will get done.
“I don’t believe the current legislature has the will to pass any type of gun safety provision,” Meyer said. “As I said, I do believe that there is a role to be played and efforts should be made to bring around enough advocacy and power and pressure to try to change the current legislature.”
Sossamon says that he hopes there will be more bipartisan discussion on gun control in the future.
“The short session’s coming up,” Sossamon said. “But we have to have a lot of things in place prior to. So hopefully there’ll be some conversations about these federal laws that have been addressed that maybe there could be some success.”