By Lindsay Street, Statehouse correspondent | A person dies from gun wounds every 11 hours in South Carolina, but the state legislature is not any closer to seeing any new gun-related laws.
A bevy of bills — from those seeking to curb gun purchases for some to others that want to expand gun access for all — are likely to meet a quiet demise in the second year of a two-year session that is laser-focused on education and Santee Cooper.
“We’re at a standstill both with gun reform and gun expansion,” Charleston Democratic Sen. Marlon Kimpson said this week. “I don’t think you’ll see any of those bills come to the floor this year and, if they do, it will be purely for political posturing.”
Senate Bill 139, which would allow anyone to carry a weapon without a permit, is on the Senate calendar for second reading, but falls further behind every day on the chamber’s contested slate. Carrying weapons without a permit is known by supporters as “constitutional carry.”
But most bills on either side of the issue remain without hearings in committees. Kimpson is a sponsor of Senate Bill 731, which would expand background checks, also known as closing the Charleston loophole. The bill has been pushed every year since a white supremacist slayed nine black church goers in Charleston in 2015. It would extend the wait time for FBI background checks from three days to five days in South Carolina. It is stuck without a hearing in the Judiciary Committee.
Charleston Democratic Rep. Wendell Gilliard also is sponsor of pending gun-safety legislation .
“There will be other tragedies until we either put up or shut up. That’s the bottom line,” he said this week. “When you look at South Carolina, as a whole, we need gun reform. Guns are any and everywhere and the statistics prove it.”
Latest data results in an “F” for S.C.
The Giffords Law Center, a gun safety group that h says stronger gun laws prevent gun violence, recently gave South Carolina an “F” for its “weak” gun laws. South Carolina has the 12th highest gun death rate in the nation, and the state is ranked seventh for exporting guns used in crimes elsewhere.
The data show a person is killed by a gun in South Carolina every 11 hours. Here are some other statistics from the report card:
- Gun violence is the second leading cause of death for S.C. children under 17.
- More than 65 percent of South Carolina’s domestic violence homicides involve a gun and, from 2007 to 2016, 175 women were killed with a gun by their intimate partner in South Carolina.
- More than 64 percent of all suicide deaths in South Carolina involve firearms. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the state.
While the center called the state’s gun laws “very weak,” it also highlighted that the state allows some mental health record reporting to federal background check databases and has a firearm prohibition for some domestic abusers.
- Previous coverage: In South Carolina, residents want something done about guns.
‘Opposite direction’
In the wake of the Emanuel AME Church shooting in 2015, the grassroots organization Arm-in-Arm was founded. The nonprofit seeks a “middle ground” on the gun debate. Board Chair Peter Zalka recently touted the group’s recruitment of gun owners.
The group also recently decried the legislature’s consideration of two bills, constitutional carry in the Senate, and House Bill 4472, which seeks to allow concealed weapon permit holders to carry openly, known as open carry.
“Not only are we ignoring opportunities to create safer communities, we’re going in the opposite direction with open carry,” Zalka said in a press release.
Arm-in-Arm said South Carolina’s resistance to open carry is growing, and that the list of those challenging such laws include law enforcement professionals, mayors of Columbia and Charleston, the League of Women Voters of South Carolina, the Christian Action Council, The National Council of Negro Women Bethune Leonard chapter, The Safe Schools Project, and assorted faith leaders.
“South Carolinians overwhelmingly support stronger gun-safety laws at the state level,” Zalka said.
But open-carry co-sponsor Greenville Republican Rep. Ashley Trantham said the bill wouldn’t make South Carolina less safe, and could make it safer.
“If you look at where these shootings are taking place … (these shooters) know they can do as much destruction as possible … there is nobody there armed,” Trantham said. She cited a December church shooting in Texas where an armed security guard stopped a rampage, and said would-be shooters would be deterred by seeing guns on the hips of law-abiding citizens.
“Think about it, what a difference in every single situation. How many lives would have been saved if that person wasn’t the only one with means to take life?”
‘Until we change’
The Democrats of the Statehouse seeking to curb gun access say they aren’t giving up even after decades of defeat.
“In South Carolina, you have to be persistent,” Gilliard said. He said he keeps introducing gun legislation in the hopes that it is already in committee, ready to be passed after the next tragedy.
“When the tragedy happens you can wake and shake those people up before they go back to business as usual,” he said.
But Kimpson said South Carolina has had plenty of tragedies and yet still won’t enact gun legislation. The Emanuel AME Church massacre in 2015, the Townville Elementary School shooting in 2016, and the big numbers of domestic violence shootings and suicides haven’t caused any gun-safety bill to budge, he said.
“Until we change the legislature, which by the way for almost two decades has been exclusively controlled by Republicans, it’s not likely we will have a gun reform law,” Kimpson said, adding that he was biding his time until Democrats once again control the legislature and the Governor’s Mansion.
Trantham said she would be willing to consider gun-safety legislation so long as it doesn’t infringe upon law-abiding citizens, and it can be proven that it would have stopped tragedies like the Emanuel massacre.
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