North Carolina Criminal Law Blog

Several federal circuit courts have decided Second Amendment cases over the past few months. This post summarizes them. The cases and the reasoning behind them are not all completely consistent, but collectively, the courts continue to interpret the Second Amendment as permitting substantial levels of gun control.

The Second Circuit just decided a case regarding gun control legislation in Connecticut and New York. It’s important in its own right, and because it concerns two issues that the Supreme Court could soon take up: bans on assault weapons and on high-capacity magazines.

Regular readers know that I try to keep abreast of changes in gun laws, both because guns are involved in a significant number of serious crimes and because the gun laws themselves are often criminal provisions. There’s been considerable recent media coverage of a proposal by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives to change the legal status of a specific type of ammunition. Depending on who you talk to, the move is either a technical reclassification that will improve officer safety at no significant cost to law-abiding gun owners, or President Obama’s first step towards gun control by executive action. As usual for a School of Government piece, this post doesn’t take a side, but does provide some facts.

There’s been a great deal of litigation recently about firearms and the Second Amendment. But guns aren’t the only “arms” sometimes carried for self-defense, and there have been several recent cases about the status of knives under the federal Constitution and state constitutions.

On balance, Americans like freedom, choices, and guns. It would seem to follow that Americans would support a free market that gives us an array of choices among guns. Yet […]

This week, the court of appeals decided State v. Price, an interesting gun rights and Fourth Amendment case. Facts. The defendant was standing in a forest, near a deer stand, […]

Case study: the Neenah stop. Recently in Neenah, WI, a woman called the police to report a man with a gun strapped to his back walking down the street. The […]

Can a concealed carry permit holder carry a concealed handgun in a park? On a playground? The legislature has changed the law in this area twice in recent years and […]

Remember Britt v. State, 363 N.C. 546 (2009), in which the state supreme court ruled that a man with a single, non-violent felony conviction from 1979 had a state constitutional […]

Do law-abiding North Carolina residents have a right to carry a gun openly in public? Generally, yes. Federal constitutional right? The Supreme Court has recently ruled that the Second Amendment […]