If you have been following Alabama gun politics, you might have heard about AL HB39 proposed by Alabama state representative Proncey Robertson (R-District 7).
To read the news, this is the beginning of gun registration in Alabama.
“They need to back off of trying to regulate people who lawfully carry weapons,” Eddie Fulmer with BamaCarry said.
Fulmer believes people who aren’t supposed to have a gun should be the only ones in the system.
“Permit holders in Alabama are some of the most law-abiding citizens there are. We’re the least likely to commit a crime of any part of society. What they are worried about here is a very insignificant amount of people when it comes to revoking a permit,” Fulmer said.
Holy shit, Alabama is turning into California.
Or, maybe not. This is the synopsis from the text of the bill.
Under current law, concealed carry permits are issued by the sheriffs of each county. Each sheriff may have different fees, forms, and processes for the issuance of a concealed carry permit. Further, each county may maintain separate databases of individuals authorized to carry a pistol in a vehicle or concealed on or about his or her person within this state. This bill would standardize a process by which concealed carry permits may be issued statewide and would create a state concealed carry
permit information system by which relevant data may be maintained and provided to law enforcement. This bill would also integrate into that
state information system existing data relating to concealed carry permits issued by county sheriffs. This bill would provide that concealed carry permits may be issued for terms of one year or five years or for the lifetime of the permit holder. This bill would authorize the Alabama State Law Enforcement Agency to conduct background checks on persons with concealed carry permits in order to ensure continued compliance with state and federal law.
This bill would also provide that the Alabama State Law Enforcement Agency may revoke a permit after a determination that the permit holder
should not possess a permit under the same criteria for the issuance of a permit. This bill would allow sheriffs and other law enforcement officers to request that the Alabama State Law Enforcement Agency revoke a concealed carry permit upon reasonable belief that the permit holder should not possess a permit under the same criteria for the issuance of a permit. This bill would allow an individual whose permit has been revoked to appeal that revocation to the district court of his or her county of residence within 30 days of the revocation.
This bill would require municipal, county, probate, and state courts to report to the Alabama State Law Enforcement Agency any disposition which would render that individual ineligible for a concealed carry permit, as well as report to the agency any update to any disposition which was previously forwarded to the Alabama State Law Enforcement Agency, including notice of any appeal, expungement, pardon, commutation, or restoration of civil rights.
This bill will make several clerical edits to existing sections of the Code of Alabama 1975, to make law relating to concealed carry permits uniform.
Here is something that happened in Alabama a year or so ago that BamaCarry seems to have overlooked.
It used to be that anyone with a concealed carry permit issued in Alabama could buy a gun from a dealer without having to do a 4473 or NICS check. Then the ATF discovered that some sheriffs were not doing the proper background checks when issuing concealed carry permits or were not revoking permits when permit holders were made into prohibited persons through a conviction.
So it seems to me that State Rep Robertson wants fix this with a state standard and centralized database.
Right now, someone with a revoked Alabama pistol permit can be pulled over in Birmingham or Huntsville and there is no way for the local cop to know if his permit was revoked in his rural county because some slack-ass sheriff didn’t report the revocation.
Furthermore, every county’s permit looks a little different. I can pay $5 a year and get a piece of paper I need to laminate myself or for $10 a year I get something that looks official on a plastic card with my picture. Some counties don’t have that option so all you can get is a piece of paper.
Having one statewide standard that meets the Federal NICS standard, with one statewide database, with one statewide fee structure, and one statewide consistent permit isn’t the beginning of gun registration in Alabama. That’s the way it’s been in every other state I’ve ever lived in an had a permit issued to me in.
This is a perfectly reasonable bill that is needed to correct a problem created by Sheriff’s departments who failed to do their due diligence to make sure criminals were not issued permits to begin with.
If you don’t like this bill, don’t blame Rep Robertson, blame the slack-ass Sheriffs who made it necessary.
Also, one more thing.
Don’t forget that in places like California, giving the sheriff total discretion for permits without a state standard for shall issue means that Blue counties don’t issue permits.
A single state standard with Shall Issue means that a sheriff on a power trip can’t deny you your rights because he feels like it.
IRRC, Alabama does not have a true Shall Carry but a very generous May Carry. This sounds like a fix
It’s dependent on the county. Most counties are shall issue. Which is why a state wide shall issue standard is a good idea.
Alabama has been shall issue since 2013.
Granted it doesn’t seem to be a bad bill, per se.
The gun owner reaction speaks to how distrustful of our legislators we seem to have become. Not, perhaps, without good reason.
Believe me, I rarely trust the intent of a legislature. What I am intolerant of is reactions out of ignorance. I don’t care what side a person is on.
When the TDS crowd says something nuts because they haven’t read the bill and are doing a bad faith interpretation of a third hand account of what is says, we are right to mock them.
It seems that nobody in BamaCarry read the bill and understand the context and doing the same reaction out of ignorance. They do our side no favors when they act like that.
There is a bit of misinformation here. Alabama has a statewide licensing standard that is administered at the county level. The fees are capped out by statute. All of this can be seen for yourselves in 13A-11-73.
One of the problems with the bill is that it will make permit holders identifiable by license plate and gun owners don’t want to be harassed by traffic cops. This was an issue in Michigan, it got so bad that the law was changed so licensing info wasn’t readily available.
This issue could easily be fixed by leaving the county permit system in place (with a lower fee) and creating an ADDITIONAL licensing authority through the highway patrol for a lifetime license. This way, people who are concerned about a cop pulling them over and approaching the car and preemptively asking “where’s the gun?” can not partake in the “new and improved” bill.
What would be useful in any state that has any form of carry permit holders database is what NH did: require the database to be confidential and explicitly exempt from any FOIA rules.
That avoids a big issue with these databases: that they can be exposed by the enemy for doxxing permit holders. NH did this well; they took “confidential” so seriously they wouldn’t even disclose the number of permit holders.
Constitutional Carry is the best answer, of course, but so long as there are permits they should at least be properly protected by law.
The concern isn’t the database being public info. The concern is that it will be readily available to cops upon running a license plate and some cops will harass certain people if they see they have a carry license. This has happened in many states and it is a problem that some people in Alabama want to keep from becoming a problem in the state.