Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler has stated that firearms, even those carried pursuant to a concealed carry permit, will be prohibited at the North Carolina State Fair, which opens next week. Grass Roots North Carolina, a gun-rights group, contends that the Commissioner’s policy is unlawful. In the post, I’ll explore the legal issue. Let me start with a disclaimer. The School of Government is policy neutral. Institutionally, we don’t have a position on what the law should be. We are educators who try to explain what the law is. So nothing in this post should be construed as expressing an opinion about whether the law should or should not permit guns at the State Fair. With that out of the way, let’s get to the legal analysis. Concealed carry. The principal concealed carry statute is G.S. 14-415.11. It establishes the general rule that a person with a concealed carry permit “may carry a concealed handgun unless otherwise specifically prohibited by law.” So, under the law, concealed carry is allowed at the State Fair unless there is a law specifically prohibiting it, or allowing the Agriculture Commissioner to prohibit it. To the best of my knowledge, the Commissioner hasn’t publicly identified any such law. Discussion in the media has focused on two possible candidates: 1. Specified state property. The concealed carry statute says that concealed carry is not allowed in “areas prohibited by G.S. 14-269.4,” which makes it a crime to possess a gun on certain state property. But the statute applies only [...]
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