Five years ago, I filed legislation to restore your constitutional right to carry without a permit--either openly or concealed. When I filed the bill, the House obstinately refused to even consider voting on the bill.
Now at long last, a path to passing Constitutional Carry is finally opening up.
Since my last account of our fight, we’ve had some exciting developments, and it’s high time that I told you the story of how we got here!
This fight is far from over, and this is a long read. If you just want to know how you can help, feel free to skip to the end.
They voted to kill the bill. Now they’re gone!
Sometimes it takes a few election cycles to get a controversial bill passed (basically, any bill that restores your liberties).
Our conservative movement has this bad tendency to view each political fight as an isolated skirmish. We don’t use the opportunity to grow our numbers and our resources with each round. The left, however, does. It’s no wonder that they win and we lose, time and time again.
I knew going into this that passing constitutional carry legislation would be a multi-session, multi-election-year fight.
How do you change a politician’s behavior? It’s simple, really. You make them vote, and then when they vote wrong, you punish them for it. When election time comes round, you remind everyone how they voted. Someone runs against them. Maybe they get beat, maybe they don’t, it doesn’t matter. Then you make them vote again…and repeat the cycle as many times as it takes.
One of two things is bound to happen: either they vote your way, or they get replaced with someone who will.
Well, I’m happy to report that of the members of the state house who voted to kill the bill in 2017, sixteen of them didn’t come back after the election!
Of these, three in particular are special.
Judiciary Chairman Greg Delleney
This is the guy who blocked constitutional carry from getting a committee hearing from 2015 to 2017. When Palmetto Gun Rights and I delivered over 12,000 petitions to his office insisting that he give the bill a fair hearing, he got belligerent and yelled at us.
So at the end of the session, he retired and didn’t run for re-election. I guess he got tired of the heat!
Greg Duckworth
When the gun owners in Horry County found out how Greg Duckworth voted, he lost his primary re-election by only 17 votes!
Mike Pitts saw it coming and tried to “educate” the angry gun owners, but there was no stopping them.
Mike Pitts
Ah, Mike Pitts. The former cop, CWP instructor, NRA favorite…and senior member of the RINO establishment. He of all people should have supported constitutional carry, but instead he voted to kill the bill.
That vote proved to be so awkward to explain to the angry voters of Laurens County that only days later he filed a fake permitless carry bill (H.3930), which immediately passed through Delleney’s judiciary committee. The bill passed the house only a few weeks later, and died in the senate.
After Duckworth’s narrow defeat in the 2018 primary, Pitts immediately blamed me, and started plotting with the majority leader to expel me from the House Republican Caucus. He demanded retribution, claiming that I “set up” fellow Republicans with “trick procedures” that cost them their re-elections.
Of course, all I did was file the bill and demand a vote. It wasn’t my fault that they voted wrong, and that their constituents didn’t like it.
Pitts resigned late in 2018 after a near-fatal heart attack while hunting in Montana, just before the upcoming legislative session.
Honorable mention: Sylleste Davis
Sylleste also voted to kill the bill in 2017, and very nearly paid for it in her primary election. She won by only 45 votes, amid alleged election irregularities.
Although her primary challenger Tom Fernandez lost, he hasn’t stopped hammering her for voting to kill Constitutional Carry, which has forced her to change positions and start supporting my bill in 2019.
Leadership Shakeups
Committee chairmen are the supports of the establishment, and wield nearly unlimited control over which bills get heard(or not) in their committees. There were major shakeups, some expected, and some not, which left the establishment loyalists scrambling.
Judiciary Committee: since Chairman Delleney retired, Peter McCoy was tapped for the job. This was a hopeful development, since McCoy chaired the sub-committee that gave my bill a hearing in 2016. In that hearing, he advocated for the bill and passed it out. This meant that the new chair would be more cooperative…or so we hoped.
Ways & Means Committee: Chairman Brian White controlled the House budget and was one of the most powerful politicians in the state. He, too, voted to kill my bill in the 2017 vote, along with his best friend Mike Pitts. However, he’d been exposed for corruption and although he has not been prosecuted, the Speaker of the House stripped him of his chairmanship and his committee assignment. Brian was succeeded by Murrell Smith as the new chairman.
Ethics Committee: Mike Pitts was the chairman of the House Ethics Committee, which was responsible for prosecuting ethical corruption in the statehouse (did I mention that he was best friends with Brian White?) When he resigned for health reasons, he was succeeded by Murrell Smith as the new chairman.
New Allies
The incoming freshmen included Bobby Cox, an employee of the gun company Sig Sauer, who was staunchly pro second amendment. William Bailey defeated Greg Duckworth in the Republican primary. Stewart Jones won the special election to replace Mike Pitts. Each one of these guys enthusiastically cosponsored Constitutional Carry upon taking office.
Freedom Action Network of South Carolina became a major new grassroots ally, and have repeatedly mobilized their members in support of Constitutional Carry. They played a role in Duckworth’s defeat.
Multiple Bills Filed
H.3456, by Rep. Jonathon Hill
My constitutional carry bill restores your right to carry per the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. Under this bill, all legal gun owners may carry openly or concealed without a Concealed Weapons Permit (CWP). It does not eliminate the CWP as a voluntary option, in fact it strengthens the SC CWP by expanding reciprocity with other states, for those of us who travel.
This bill was drafted with help from attorneys at the National Association for Gun Rights and upstate gun rights attorney Robert Merting. It is by far the most thorough gun bill of its kind ever drafted for South Carolina. I re-filed it for the third time at the beginning of the 2019 legislative session.
H.3999, by Rep. Bobby Cox
This alternate bill by Bobby Cox is also very solid and well-crafted, and I co-sponsored it.
S.139, by Sen. Shane Martin
Senator Martin is the key advocate for Constitutional Carry in the Senate. While not quite as legally well crafted as the House bills, it is nevertheless a complete restoration of your right to carry openly or concealed.
Rep. Peter McCoy
Leadership We CAN’T Count On
Our hopes were dashed pretty quickly that Judiciary Chairman McCoy would, unlike his predecessor Delleney, give constitutional carry a fair and expedient hearing.
He was never man enough to tell me “no” outright. In fact, he said “yes” over and over each time I asked him for a hearing on the bill. But he would never give me a date or even so much as an approximate time frame for when his committee would hear the bill—and that was the tell.
Worse still, McCoy gave fellow Charleston Representative J.A. Moore, a Democrat, the same promise to hear his gun-control bill (H.3248) in committee. This bill would purportedly close the so-called “Charleston loophole,” even though it has been repeatedly debunked that any such loophole exists or that the measure would have prevented the tragic shooting of Senator Clemente Pinckney.
With five years of experience under my belt, I wasn’t a newbie anymore, and I was prepared for this. So, I systematically began to remove his excuses for inaction.
Cosponsor Letter
I started by rounding up 19 co-sponsors to my bill. We jointly signed a letter to Chairman McCoy urging him to take“swift and decisive action” on the bill.
We warned:
“Failure to take decisive action to pass [Constitutional Carry] may send the signal that the South Carolina House is not willing to protect the citizen’s right to self-defense, at the precise moment when other states are advancing many forms of increased gun control.”
Unfortunately, my warning was proved true within a matter of weeks.
Forty Days of Silence
Sadly, Chairman McCoy continued to block the bill. Rather than flexing his newfound authority as Judiciary Chairman, he appeared to be seeking permission from Speaker of the House Jay Lucas at every turn. Lucas, in turn, appeared to march to the drum of Majority Leader Gary Simrill. (The latter two both voted to kill the bill in 2017.)
McCoy showed that wasn’t even a weak leader—he didn’t view himself as a leader at all. In fact, when one of my colleagues asked him for a hearing on an important pro-life bill, I overheard McCoy ask, “have you talked with leadership about this?” Shocked, I retorted to McCoy, “what do you think he’s doing right now?!”
Demand Letter
So, I doubled down on McCoy with a terse demand letter invoking House Rule 4.6, which states that if a bill hasn’t been heard within 20 days of being assigned to a committee, that the author may write the chairman a letter requesting a hearing, and then the chairman upon receipt of this letter must schedule a hearing within the next seven legislative days.
The Old Committee Dodge Tactic
Chairman McCoy complied with the rule by scheduling a hearing, but he stacked the deck and put my bill (H.3456) to the bottom of the agenda on a Thursday morning in March, with several controversial bills ahead of it. Thursday morning meetings happen at 9am and are time-limited to one hour, per House rules.
When subcommittee chairman Weston Newton convened the meeting, he announced to everyone present that “the rules required that we add the last bill to the agenda today, but we will not hear it.”
Subsequently, every effort to get Chairman McCoy or Chairman Newton to either a) reconvene the meeting Thursday afternoon or b) to keep the same agenda order so that we would eventually get to the bill at a future meeting were both flat out rejected.
So, I warned him that the voters wouldn’t be happy.
Excuses, Excuses
The Wrong Sponsor: “We Won’t Work With Jonathon”
So, why not vote for H.3999, Bobby Cox’s bill?
Some Reps won’t vote for my bills because they don’t like me or the way I have exposed their corrupt conduct. Chairman Bill Sandifer is one of these. He has sworn multiple times that he will never, ever, vote for anything with my name on it.
Of course, politicians like Sandifer are lying: they don’t want Constitutional Carry under any name, and they have been no help at all to Cox, who has found his bill blocked at every turn (surprise, surprise).
In each of my petitions and call to action, I have asked activists to pass either one of our bills: H.3456 or H.3999. I honestly don’t care who gets the credit just so long as our rights are restored.
The Wrong Priority: “The House Republican Caucus Has Other Items On the Agenda”
But who decided this? There was never a vote or a consensus. Majority Leader Simrill just set the agenda…and that was that.
The Wrong Allies: “Groups like Palmetto Gun Rights and Freedom Action Network are shady”
Well, no, they aren’t, unless you call grassroots activists mobilizing for the sake of their rights “shady.” What an insult to the freedom-loving people of South Carolina!
People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw rocks, and the 2018 statehouse corruption probe proved who the real shady characters are: the occupiers of the statehouse dome.
The Wrong Procedure: “He could have used the rules to get a committee hearing”
Following the 2017 vote to kill constitutional carry, house leaders accused me of circumventing the committee process, and of ignoring multiple avenues in the House rules to get a committee hearing on my bill.
So, I wrote the demand letter invoking rule 4.6, knowing that they would stack the deck and dodge giving the bill a legitimate hearing, just to take away that particular excuse.
I know the rules better than nearly all of my colleagues in the house. In fact, it’s exactly how I was able to get the 2017 vote to begin with. They don’t want to get in a rule fight with me, and they know it!
For instance, as the session waned in 2019, I used the rules to hold numerous bills hostage, delaying them by weeks in some cases. I called it “my little bargaining chip.”
The Wrong Policy: “South Carolina Doesn’t Want Constitutional Carry.”
Well, if that’s what they think, we’ll confront McCoy and his cronies with larger and larger groups of angry voters.
To this end, I created a petition and began a statewide tour of activist groups and gun clubs to grow our ranks.
Each signed petition gets hand-delivered to that person’s state representative, and Chairman McCoy gets a copy.
Rising Stakes: Red Flag Laws
Recent highly-publicized mass shooting events created a very polarized political environment.
In some states, this environment led to better gun laws. Several states, like Oklahoma and Kentucky, passed constitutional carry in 2019.
John Feinblatt, Everytown for Gun Safety President, noticed that in many states politicians were no longer afraid to talk about gun control. Giffords Law Center predicted that in 2019 even more states would pass “red flag” laws.
What is a “red flag” laws? Also known as “Extreme Risk Protection Orders,” red flag laws provide a way for law enforcement to confiscate guns after an anonymous accusation that you are dangerous or mentally unfit. These orders often result in no-knock SWAT raids in the dead of night, which have been sometimes fatal for the accused. Afterwards, the accused, who has committed no crime, must stand in court and prove their innocence in order to regain their property.
This egregiously unconstitutional and often-abused law is growing in popularity, even in Republican states, including Florida, Indiana, and Tennessee. Throughout 2018 and 2019, they passed red flag laws and other “reasonable” gun control measures.
Which way will South Carolina go? Will we pass constitutional carry, or red flag?
As Virginia Senator David Marsden said, “doing nothing is no longer an option.”
Moms Demand
Just in time for the committee hearing on my bill, EveryTown sent out this action alert to their members:
Simultaneously, the “demanding mommies” showed up at the capitol in their red shirts and over the course of several days lobbied legislators against my bill.
When the committee meeting adjourned without hearing my bill, a lobbyist in the committee room was overheard quieting an upset activist who wanted to speak against the bill. “We won,” he told her.
Senator Lindsey Graham
Next, our own US Senator Lindsey Graham publicly endorsed a national “red flag” law and promised to give it a hearing in his committee.
So, Dudley Brown of the National Association for Gun Rights and I teamed up in Greenville to denounce his position.
Following up on this, Rep. Stewart Jones and I got up a letter signed by 39 of us in the state house and senate rejecting this proposal and asking President Trump to back away from our gun rights. He has dropped the proposal for now, although that could change at any moment.
Capitol City Gun Grabs
Emboldened over the summer, Columbia Mayor Steve Benjamin and the city council passed their own local version of a “red flag” law.
They did this in direct defiance of state law, which preempts cities and counties from regulating guns. It would seem that their strategy for changing the law to challenge the law.
I requested legal opinions from the Attorney General, who agreed that the city did indeed violate the law.
Where are Chairman McCoy, Speaker Lucas, and Majority Leader Simrill, the leaders of the establishment?
They’re MIA.
Simrill, at a summer caucus retreat, remarked to one of my colleagues that “we can’t pass constitutional carry because we’re too busy playing defense. And besides, we can’t have the tail wagging the dog” (paraphrased). To which my colleague astutely replied, “neither can we bite the hand that feeds us.”
There is no middle ground. South Carolina will not stand still. Which way will we go?
Morton Blackwell said that political battles are decided by the “number and effectiveness of the activists on each side of the issue.”
The Bonnen Incident
Over the spring, while we tried to get a committee hearing in the house on my bill, Senator Martin was having slightly better luck in the Senate. His bill, S.139, was finally scheduled for a hearing in April.
The weekend before that hearing, way over in Texas, another constitutional carry fight was raging. Texas Gun Rights executive director Chris McNutt, visited Speaker Dennis Bonnen’s neighborhood, putting out flyers pressuring Bonnen to stop blocking the bill.
So, Bonnen “deliberately overreacted,” as McNutt put it. Bonnen’s wife said McNutt’s visit made her feel unsafe. This was a total fabrication, as evidence would later prove, but Bonnen was nevertheless assigned a security detail for his personal residence.
It made national news, and the next day someone in South Carolina noticed.
Then, Chairman McCoy took a page from Bonnen’s playbook and decided that he, too, felt threatened and deliberately overreacted.
Senate subcommittee chairman Steven Goldfinch used the dust-up as an excuse to cancel the hearing on Senator Martin’s bill (S.139):
Others joined in the overreaction:
Getting Thrown Out of Caucus
Prior to resigning, Mike Pitts in a House Republican Caucus meeting at the beginning of session had renewed his call to come up with a process to punish people like me for forcing them to vote when they didn’t want to. Majority Leader Gary Simrill responded at the time by claiming that their attorneys had looked over the caucus rules and there was nothing they could do, and that a committee would study the issue and come up with a proposal. I knew at that moment they had a plan and were saving it for a rainy day.
Well, that rainy day finally came in April after the Bonnen and McCoy overreactions. Pitts had resigned months before, but Simrill nevertheless decided to use the opportunity to put Pitts plan into motion.
I was summoned from my office at the statehouse to come down to the caucus meeting room, and was berated by at least a dozen different members of my own party caucus.
I was blamed for inciting violent rhetoric and many other things, even though the Speaker kicked off the meeting by noting that state law enforcement was investigating the threats and so far they had been unfounded.
Once everyone had their say and I had a chance to calmly respond, Majority Leader Simrill announced that they’d“revisited the rules” and that “actually, Rule 1 states that the majority prevails on any question,” which he interpreted to mean that they could pretty much do whatever they want if the majority votes for it.
He made the motion to suspend my membership in the House Republican Caucus, thus barring me from attending any further meetings. The vote passed by approximately 70-5 (it was a show of hands vote, and it wasn’t recorded).
I walked out that day, a confirmed swamp outsider! It’s the highlight of my time in office!
A Possible Path To Victory Emerges
In the final days of the 2019 session, a 2020 path to victory began to emerge.
First, Senator Martin managed to pull S.139 out of Senator Goldfinch’s committee and to the Senate floor, setting the stage for the bill to be debated and passed out of the Senate in 2020.
This is significant, because it was the first of three MAJOR procedural hurdles the bill has to clear in the Senate:
Getting the bill past Senate Judiciary Chairman Luke Rankin, a liberal party-switcher and an even bigger obstructionist than Delleney had been
Getting the bill past the Democrat’s objections, using a procedure called special order
Breaking the Democrats’ filibuster, using a procedure called cloture
If the bill clears these three hurdles, it will pass the Senate, and then the House would have to pass the bill, because the political price of killing it at that point would be devastating for the House Republican Caucus.
On the last day of the 2019 session, I forced two more votes in the House. On the second one, we were only 8 votes away from winning (47-54)—a FAR cry from the lopsided 20-79 vote in 2017!
This vote was on an amendment to the sine die resolution, which is usually a routine resolution that the legislature passes governing when and if we come back over the summer into special session.
My amendment would have put all three of the constitutional carry bills into the resolution as topics that we could reconvene over the summer to deal with…and it almost passed.
What Now?
Will 2020 be the year of constitutional carry? It might be. We’ll know soon, that’s for sure. My allies and I have plans in the works for the upcoming 2020 legislative session.
Then there is the 2020 election, and everyone in both the state house and the state senate are up for re-election. Who knows what the angry voters will do next!
Regardless, we aren’t going away, and we’re determined to make the politicians of South Carolina pass this bill, or get replaced with someone else who will!
How You Can Help
Share this article on your favorite social media site
Sign the petition to Pass Constitutional Carry in South Carolina
Sign the petition to STOP City-Level “Red Flag” Gun Bans
Chip in and help fund my 2020 plan
Run against one of these Republicans who opposed Constitutional Carry in 2019:
Bill Sandifer (R-Oconee)
Neal Collins (R-Pickens)
West Cox (R-Anderson)
Max Hyde (R-Spartanburg)
Phillip Lowe (R-Florence)
Paula Calhoon (R-Lexington)
Bart Blackwell (R-Aiken)
Bruce Bryant (R-York)
Con Chellis (R-Dorchester)
Steve Moss (R-Cherokee)
Bruce Bannister (R-Greenville)
Peter McCoy (R-Charleston)
Weston Newton (R-Beaufort)
Raye Felder (R-York)
Shannon Erickson (R-Beaufort)
Eddie Tallon (R-Spartanburg)
Jeff Bradley (R-Beaufort)
Gary Simrill (R-York)
Jay Lucas (R-Chesterfield)
Kirkman Finley (R-Richland)
Kit Spires (R-Lexington)
William Cogswell (R-Charleston)
Mike Sottile (R-Charleston)