news-record.com

Is it illegal to carry a gun in a snowstorm? Sometimes it is, in North Carolina. This legal quirk has triggered a lawsuit by the same group that supported the Chicago case decided in favor of gun rights by the U.S. Supreme Court last week. This one shouldn’t go that far.

Back in January, Gov. Bev Perdue declared a state of emergency in western North Carolina “due to the continued period of cold weather and the after-effects of the winter storm.”

She was concerned about fuel supplies, and the state of emergency allowed her to order a suspension of safety regulations so that truck drivers hauling heating oil could log more hours on the road.

Her action also dragged with it an obscure provision in state law that makes it “unlawful for any person to transport or possess off his own premises any dangerous weapon or substance in any area in which a declared state of emergency exists. ...”

Surely, legislators had something else in mind other than banning guns in cold weather when they wrote this measure decades ago. And it certainly would not be worth enforcing this law, except when someone is using the gun to commit a crime — stealing firewood, maybe.

Now the Second Amendment Foundation, based in Bellevue, Wash., has filed a suit in federal court in Raleigh against the state, claiming the law violates, obviously, the Second Amendment rights of North Carolina residents. Three actual residents joined the suit, as did Grass Roots North Carolina, a firearms-advocacy organization.

Also named as a defendant is the Stokes County town of King, which in February declared its own winter-weather state of emergency. A separate law allows municipalities to enact ordinances that, during emergencies, limit business operations, restrict the movement of people and prohibit the possession, transportation, buying and selling of dangerous weapons, gasoline and alcoholic beverages.

The Second Amendment Foundation backed plaintiffs in the successful challenge of Chicago’s ordinance prohibiting residents from keeping handguns. The Supreme Court said the city was overriding the constitutional right of people to own firearms.

The court also said other local restrictions on gun ownership might be reasonable.

The North Carolina law might not meet that test. There should be a compelling reason why someone who is the legal owner of a firearm should be barred from carrying it from his home to a shooting range, even if the governor has declared a state of emergency because of cold weather. That might make sense in some kinds of emergencies — a breakdown of civic order, for example — but the law should make distinctions. The blanket prohibition doesn’t seem justified, and the state should stipulate that it is not enforceable as it’s written.

This case isn’t one that should go all the way to the Supreme Court for resolution.