Gabby Giffords’s Gun Control Group Fights for Permit to Purchase in NC

Just days after Carol Bowne was stabbed to death while waiting for state permission to buy a gun in New Jersey, Gabby Giffords’s gun control group is lobbying to keep a permit-to-purchase law on the books in North Carolina.

Breitbart News previously reported that Bowne had a restraining order against her former boyfriend and applied for a license to buy a handgun for self-defense. But nearly four weeks after applying, she still had not received the state’s permission and was defenseless when her former boyfriend allegedly stabbed her to death on June 3.

Giffords’s gun control group—Americans for Responsible Solutions—is now fighting House Bill 562: a GOP-sponsored bill designed to roll back the permit-to-purchase process in the North Carolina.

According to The Charlotte Observer, Giffords’s group is running a television ad in which Wilson County Sheriff Wayne Gay says:

“As a sheriff for 28 years, I fought to keep our communities safe,” Gay says in the new ad. “But right now, some in the legislature want to repeal background checks on handguns. This will make it easier for criminals and the mentally ill to get guns. … Tell the folks in Raleigh we need to keep background checks.”

But as HB 562 does not remove background checks, as they are federal requirement. Rather, it removes the very kind of state level permit-to-purchase requirement that failed Bowne so miserably in New Jersey.

Permit-to-purchase approval depends on a sheriff signing off on each individual applicant. And state Rep. Jacqueline Schaffer (R-Charlotte), sponsor of HB 562, explained that it is this aspect of the permit to purchase a gun that has North Carolinians so worried.

She said, “There are a lot of individuals around the state who feel they are arbitrarily denied a permit by a sheriff. So if we go to a standardized system, people feel that would be a more fair system.”

Each gun control law added to the Second Amendment does, to one degree or another, stifle the exercise of the Second Amendment. In the case of North Carolina, the most egregious control is a permit-to-purchase process that invites infringement via a sheriff with a pontential personal vendetta. In New Jersey, it is the simple fact that the process for approval for a permit takes approximately two months.

In either case, there are precious hours, days, or weeks where an applicant under threat is left to cower in fear while the state decides whether to grant permission to exercise the Second Amendment.

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.