TUSCUMBIA — Saturday at the monthly meeting of the Shoals Republican Club, State Rep. Andrew Sorrell (R-Muscle Shoals) explained his opposition to a statewide universal database of concealed carry permit holders, an issue now being taken on by lawmakers in Montgomery.
Sorrell is a proponent of constitutional carry, an argument that given the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees the right to own and bear arms, an individual should not have to pay the government through the purchase of a permit to exercise that right.
According to the Colbert County lawmaker, centralizing a database concealed carry permit holders was not a good idea for privacy concerns and did not directly address the problem of law enforcement being aware of a criminal in possession of a firearm in certain situations.
“[S]omebody in the New York media published a list of everybody who had a concealed carry permit,” Sorrell said. “How would you feel if your name showed up on that list? It is an absolutely terrible idea to centralize the database. What law enforcement needs is a database of criminals. When they pull up your driver’s license number or your tag number, they should be able to see if you are a criminal — if you are running from the law or if you’ve convicted of a felony, or whatever. Law enforcement needs to know that information. Why does a law enforcement officer need to know if a legal citizen, a lawful citizen has a permit? Why is that necessary information? The whole theory behind it is they got background checked when they bought the gun. They got background checked again when they bought the permit. And now, law enforcement needs to be afraid of them because they might have a gun in their car? No, that doesn’t make any sense.”
Sorrell was also an opponent of allowing the 67 county sheriffs to manage the permitting process and pointed to previous issues regarding those sheriffs’ handling of the permitting process, in which some sheriffs were allegedly bypassing the background check process.
According to Sorrell, this evidence sheriffs were more concerned about money than public safety.
“I don’t trust the sheriffs to handle it, to be honest with you — and I’ll tell you why,” he said. “Because right now in Alabama, you cannot use your concealed permit as evidence you are legally allowed to purchase a gun, whereas a year and a half ago, you could. If you walk into my pawn shop, I didn’t have to background check you. If you had a concealed carry permit, you had already been background checked. You hand me your concealed carry permit, I write the information on a [ATF Form] 4473, I throw it in the stack, and I sell you the gun. Now I have to background check everybody because there were at least four sheriffs who weren’t even running background checks before issuing concealed carry permits. So, this garbage you hear about how it is all about public safety — it’s not about public safety. Permits are and always have been about the money.”
@Jeff_Poor is a graduate of Auburn University, the editor of Breitbart TV, a columnist for Mobile’s Lagniappe Weekly and host of Huntsville’s “The Jeff Poor Show” from 2-5 p.m. on WVNN.
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