Originally Posted by wstar

I'm generally pro-states-rights as well, so I certainly see your point. To me this is a practical issue of concern though, which is why I lean the other way. I like to travel around the US a bit at times, and with the way things are now it's a pain in the *** re: concealed carry. Have to go research the current reciprocity status between TX and the other state(s), and then find out everything about how their carry laws and deadly force laws differ from ours, etc. This stuff really needs to be standardized and simple, because as it stands now it's an impediment to one of the core concepts of the 2nd ammendment: that regular people should have the right to arm and defend themselves (without hours of legal research and big question marks in their heads as they cross state borders).

Part of fixing that is getting rid of the superfluous restrictions some states have (which are arguably too infringing on 2A rights), and standardizing the rest. For instance, fed law already makes it illegal to own any kind of gun if you've ever been convicted of a felony, so that one's obvious. TX extends this in the concealed carry case to also exclude people who've committed class A misdemeanors in the past 10 years, or Class B in the last 5 - that sort of thing could be standardized across states pretty easily.

But once you start getting down into things like whether you've had a dishonorable discharge, or whether you owe unpaid child support (I think we have that restriction in TX currently), you're getting into the murky territory of suppressing a person's 2A freedom's just to punitively enforce an unrelated moral (as opposed to restrictions which relate more directly to a person's likelyhood to be a net increase rather than decrease in everyone's safety by carrying). Encouraging people not to do those things is great, but we have other laws for that, and it just seems like the gun-law version of pork. Standardize on the basics that make sense for restricting carry at a federal level: felons, misdemeanor convictions within X years, any history of mental illness without a clean bill from a psych, restraining orders, etc.