The Department of Justice has seen fit to file suit against the state of North Carolina.  The state’s offense?  Passing a law restricting the use of public bathrooms according to the sex designated on an individual’s birth certificate (which state law allows any individual to change).

The DoJ claims to be defending the rights of ‘transgender’ people to use any bathroom of their choice.  So be it; I don’t yet have a dog in this hunt (I am still working through this newly-erupted issue).

But if the DoJ has roused itself to defend our civil liberties, and if they are true to their mission statement of “ensur[ing] fair and impartial administration of justice for all Americans,” then I have an opportunity to suggest to them.  It involves many times more aggrieved citizens, many more offending states ripe for suing, and widespread violations of a civil right more fundamental than personal choice of loo.

Follow along with me…

Estimates are sketchy, but about 700,000 citizens are transgender, or about 0.22% of total U.S. population (approximately 320 million).  Of North Carolina’s 10 million residents, about 37,000 (including teenagers) are transgender, or 0.37%, i.e., about one-third of one percent.

Despite their small numbers, transgender people possess all the same liberties as any other citizen, and a government tasked with defending those liberties (as ours is supposed to do) should so defend.  Whether such liberty allows them to use a public bathroom of their choice is a new and untested question.  The issue is not enumerated in the Constitution or in any established law.  The DoJ has made this determination of their own accord, absent guidance from or consultation with Congress, courts or public discussion.

If the DoJ is moved to defend 700,000 people, from a still-untested legal position, would it be more moved to stand up for 13 million on a sound Constitutional basis?  That is the number of citizens with official, state-issued licenses to carry a handgun.  (The number of legal gun owners without a carry permit is many tens of millions more, by most estimates more than a third – i.e., more than 100 million – of all citizens.)  In Texas alone, at the end of 2015, licensed citizens numbered 937,419, with a rate of growth that probably now has the number greater than one million.¹

The right to bear arms is far from new and untested.  It is a right specifically enumerated in the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution; it has been affirmed by the judiciary many times, recently in the Supreme Court’s Heller decision, and only yesterday by the 9^th District Court of Appeals.²  The right is as old as the Constitution itself.

As established as the right is, it is violated by many states. I am licensed by the state of Texas to carry a gun³, concealed or openly, having successfully gone through the training, testing, security and background checks necessary for such license.  However, 15 other states and the District of Columbia refuse to recognize Texas permits, and will arrest and jail me if I carry a gun into their domain.

Furthermore, nine of these states⁴ refuse reciprocal rights to citizens from any state; in other words, they impose a blanket denial of 2^nd Amendment rights to all citizens of other states.  Penalties can be severe; all include options for arrest, fines and imprisonment.  This even though, at least in the state of Texas, citizens with CHLs are the most law-abiding in the population.⁵

Is this not discrimination to a broad degree?  Is this not a violation of the Supremacy Clause?

The U.S. Department of Justice (a large number of whom have donated to the leading Democrat candidate for President), of this or previous administrations, has taken no action against any of the offending states on behalf of citizens with gun licenses.

I will not hold my breath waiting for a governor or mayor to deny travel to any of these states; or for an actor or pop musician to boycott any of these states; or for Apple, Google or any other company to refuse doing business in any of these states.

Some forms of discrimination are clearly still tolerated, even encouraged.

NOTES

1 Just this week the Texas DPS announced that issued carry permits exceeded one million

2 “The panel held that…the right to keep and to bear arms for self-defense is not only a fundamental right, but an enumerated one…”  Teixeira v. County of Alameda, May 16, 2016

3 I believe in “Constitutional carry,” i.e., the right of every law-abiding, mentally stable citizen to own and bear arms with no additional sanction or burden imposed by federal, state or local government.  I secured a state concealed handgun license out of respect for the law, but I believe that the necessity to do so is a violation of a right guaranteed by the Constitution.

4 California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island. Concealed carry permit recognition is also not extended by the District of Columbia, New York City, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

5 According to detailed statistics maintained by the Texas Department of Public Safety, licensed carriers commit only 0.23% of crimes in this state (as of 2014, the latest year for which numbers have been released).  For a large majority of crimes tracked, no licensed carriers were convicted at all.