Why is it that 27 states, including quite a few which are less conservative than Louisiana is, are able to have constitutional-carry provisions in their state laws but we can’t? The answer is as simple as it is confounding.

If you haven’t heard, yesterday HB 131, which is Rep. Danny McCormick’s constitutional-carry bill, died in a Senate committee. The bill sailed through the House of Representatives with no trouble, as it should. The public supports the bill by a decent margin, and Republican voters, who have elected supermajorities in both houses of the state legislature, favor constitutional carry by a 3-to-1 margin.

None of that matters to the Louisiana Senate and its leadership.

In an email to his supporters this morning, McCormick describes the “good, bad and ugly” of the effort to drag Louisiana into the light of Second Amendment freedom…

My Friends,

This is a very painful email to write.  I don’t think I can properly express the disappointment and, well, anger I have at the shenanigans politicians played with your right to keep and bear arms.

So, I guess the best way is to list the Good, the Bad and the extremely Ugly.

Let’s start with the Good– House Bill 131, my Constitutional Carry Bill, passed through the State House of Representatives fast and intact.  Efforts to water down the Bill failed and I really had high hopes that politicians in Baton Rouge finally realized that the people demand their right to bear arms be restored… without paying another tax or begging permission to carry a firearm for self- defense.

However, looking back on it, I am pretty convinced this was because ‘leadership’ knew what the State Senate was about to do.  In fact, later events in the House proved this.

Next, the Bad- As soon as Constitutional Carry hit the State Senate, Senators began to gut it.  Here are just a few of the changes these anti-gunners stuffed into Constitutional Carry-

• Created a second-class citizenship, which is unconstitutional under the 14^th Amendment, changing the age to exercise the 2^nd Amendment from 18 to 21.
• Put hamstrings on where and how the people could bear arms.
• Demanded that anyone who carries also carry a Government issued ID at all times.  So, if you had left your wallet or purse in your car, well, felony charges would follow.
• Forced law-abiding citizens, who have committed no crime, to inform law enforcement if they are carrying, creating a tense and dangerous situation with any interaction with police officers.
• And the list goes on, clearly infringing on your Right to Keep and Bear Arms as the 2^nd Amendment demands.

Finally, the Ugly- Realizing the State Senate was not going to pass Constitutional Carry, but rather some watered down, crumb from their table, I was forced to pull my Bill.  The last thing I want to see is a bunch of anti-gun politicians crowing about how they passed ‘Constitutional Carry’, when in fact all they did was place more infringements on your rights as protected by the 2^nd Amendment.

But it gets worse.

Realizing that the State Senate was bowing to the Governor and his anti-gun agenda, I had a final play to make.  The State Senate had already passed Senate Bill 130.  This Bill gives retired law enforcement officers Constitutional Carry, but not you and me.

So, when Senate Bill 130 came up in the State House, I moved to amend it to change it from just retired law enforcement officers to all law-abiding people in the State of Louisiana.

This is where it really got Ugly.

Teaming with the anti-gunners, State Representatives and even the Speaker of the House refused to allow even a vote on this amendment.  Clearly, they were happy to allow the State Senate to amend and gut Constitutional Carry, but not allow me to amend a State Senate Bill to force the passage of Constitutional Carry in Louisiana!

If you don’t believe, please click on this link to watch the anti-gunners declare my amendment not ‘germane.’  This means they claimed that my amendment had nothing to do with the bill!  Really?  Their Bill gave only a special class of people Constitutional Carry while my amendment would make it apply to all law-abiding citizens as the Constitution requires.

This was the last chance to pass true Constitutional Carry and these anti-gun politicians showed that they really didn’t support the 2^nd Amendment. Even more, this showed that their previous vote to pass it was nothing more that grandstanding for votes in the upcoming State Election.

You just can’t make this stuff up.

Here’s the video McCormick links to…

Bryan Fontenot is an ex-cop from Thibodaux who it would seem would get a special privilege out of Morris’ bill, so it’s pretty obvious why he would sabotage McCormick’s amendment even despite the fact he voted for HB 131 on the House floor. Joe Stagni is an utterly worthless RINO who not only voted against constitutional carry but he also voted in favor of child mutilation and chemical castration when he opposed Rep. Gabe Firment’s HB 648, the transgender surgery for minors ban.

And of course Tanner Magee is the failed judicial candidate and self-aggrandizing House Speaker Pro Tem who was put in charge of the Ronald Greene probe but then decided it was too hard to get to the bottom of it and essentially punted away any attempt at unmasking the cover-up of that killing.

But what you’ll notice was how organized this came off as. They laid in wait for McCormick and then they put that production together, with statistics on how McCormick can’t pass bills in the Senate. Somebody had to do research to come up with that number as part of this petty little Mean Girls act.

And none of these people even bothered to note that this was done in pursuit of blocking Louisiana from adopting legislation that more than half the country has already adopted. In other words, the Mean Girls are holding the state back with this exercise in high school theatrics.

When you darken the doors of that state capitol, something very strange seems to happen. Maybe there’s more nitrogen and less oxygen in the air, maybe it’s the ghosts of Huey Long and Carl Weiss, maybe it’s swamp gas rising up from the basement, but something in that building simply saps away logic, reason and rationality for most of the people who work there.

If you’re a Republican, all you do is run on pro-life and pro-gun. Then you get into that building and you thumb your nose at the people who put you there.

We’re happy to listen to reasons why Tanner Magee, Bryan Fontenot and Joe Stagni shouldn’t be bounced out of the legislature like defective tennis balls, but they’d better be good. Because we see nothing that tells us Louisiana will ever get anywhere with this as its elected leadership.