Judge upholds concealed-gun ban at NC State Fair
Concealed-carry permit holders will not be able to bring their handguns into the N.C. State Fair when it opens Thursday, a Wake County Superior Court judge ruled Monday.
Judge Donald Stephens refused to issue a temporary order barring state agriculture officials from posting their standard rule that guns aren’t allowed at the fair.
Opponents of the fair’s gun ban are suing Agriculture Commissioner Steve Troxler to force his department to allow people with valid concealed-carry permits to take handguns onto the fairgrounds and its parking areas. They say a law passed last year makes the fair’s ban illegal, and were asking Monday for a temporary injunction to allow them to bring their guns in this year while Stephens considered the lawsuit.
He not only disagreed but called the law a “quagmire” and signaled that he was inclined to rule against the gun rights activists in the full lawsuit.
“I do have great respect for the constitutional right of citizens to possess and bear arms,” Stephens said. “But I do believe it would be unwise and imprudent for firearms to be carried into the State Fair, and if there is some way I can interpret these statutes to prohibit that, I will.”
Guns have been banned at the fair for decades, and Troxler has said for weeks that they would be again this year. He said Monday in an interview that not only was the new state law murky but that legislators told him they hadn’t even thought about whether it would open the fair to concealed guns.
He said he would asked the legislature to clarify the law.
During a news conference Monday, Troxler said the gun ban is meant to reduce the risk of an accident.
“We do believe that we have a unique mixture of crowds, children, rides and animals here and that minimizing the risk is just not throwing the possibility of an accidental discharge into that mix,” he said.
The gun rights advocacy group Grass Roots North Carolina said last week that its negotiations with Troxler over the issue had stalled and that a sister nonprofit group, Rights Watch International, would sue state agriculture officials and their department.
After the hearing, Grass Roots President Paul Valone said the group’s board of directors would have to decide what to do next. Valone said the simplest approach, because it appeared there was little chance of prevailing in time for this year’s fair, may be to ask the legislature to clarify the law.
Chapel Hill attorney Tom Stark, who represented the gun rights advocates Monday, said the law could be more clear, but that it wasn’t hard to understand the meaning if you jumped back and forth between the applicable parts. There was no question that the legislature’s intent had been to allow the guns in places such as the fair that weren’t explicitly singled out as exceptions, Stark said.
The suit cites the new state law, which removed a previous restriction on carrying guns into venues that charge admission. The law exempts private venues, saying that the owners could post gun bans.
Stephens, though, said he had probably spent four hours studying the pertinent laws, and he disagreed with Stark’s assertion that the legislature’s intent to allow lawful concealed handguns in places such as the fair was clear.
“It is certainly NOT clear what the legislature had in mind,” Stephens said. “I’m sorry, sir. I mean, obviously the Commissioner of Agriculture had no idea what that legislature had in mind or I suspect he would have been down there voicing his concern. I believe the governor had no idea what the legislature had in mind or he’d probably have been voicing his concern. But they weren’t, and they didn’t.
“And I honestly believe that the legislature didn’t intend this result, but they may have passed a statute that inadvertently caused this result,” he said.
Would guns be falling from rides?
Before announcing his decision, Stephens cited his stint as a U.S. Marine Corps officer, saying he had seen many weapons fired intentionally and many fired accidentally. He also noted that the law explicitly allows him to carry a gun in the courthouse, but that he had chosen not to, because the sheriff provided security and because the one way he knew there would not be gun violence in his courtroom was to make sure there were no guns in it.
He also said that while the idea of being allowed to carry guns might make the fair more attractive for some, it could have a chilling affect on attendance by scaring away others.
Stark said after the hearing that while he had the utmost respect for Stephens, he was surprised that the judge had let so much of what appeared to be his personal views on guns creep into the hearing.
North Carolina Special Deputy Attorney General Charles Whitehead argued on behalf of Troxler. He said that fair officials had a responsibility to protect the hundreds of thousands of fairgoers, and said guns could join the annual rain of keys, wallets and cellphones from the midway rides, which of course were all about flinging patrons around at high force.
There was no reason to issue a temporary order to force fair officials to allow guns because the obvious murkiness of the law made it unlikely that the gun rights advocates would prevail, Whitehead said. Also, he said, no serious damage would occur by letting the long-standing status quo of no guns continue for one more fair while the court ponders the issues.
Denying the temporary order wouldn’t prevent someone from carrying a gun, it would only prevent them from going into the fair with it, Whitehead said.
“That’s it: to have your deep fried Twinkie and ride the Tilt-A-Whirl,” he said. “That’s the right they’re talking about.”
Not true, Valone said. In a deposition filed with the lawsuit, he cited incidents of violence at state fairs in Iowa in 2010 and Wisconsin in 2011. After the hearing he said that the right of legal carriers of concealed handguns to protect themselves and their families from that sort of violence had been denied.
“How about the right to not be beaten with a pipe?” Valone said. “How about the right not to be raped in a parking lot? How about the right not to be stabbed in a parking lot, like at the Washington State Fair?”
Stark objected to Whitehead’s characterization of the damage to concealed-carry permit holders as trifling. It wouldn’t be trifling to someone in one of the distant parking lots, or someone going into a dark corner of the fairgrounds to retrieve animal feed, who was accosted by someone with criminal intent, he said.
The suit says that the fair’s antigun rule infringes on the rights of more than 350,000 such permit holders in the state.
In his deposition, Valone, a state-certified firearms instructor and long-time competitive shooter, cited modern advances in holsters and gun design that made falling guns and accidental discharges unlikely.
Given those protections, he said, allowing lawfully-carried guns would actually make the fair safer.
‘We want everybody to feel safe’
Stephens disputed the idea that the advances in firearm and holster technology would ensure safety. There was nothing to prevent someone from simply carrying a cheaply made gun into the fair in their pocket, if they had a permit.
Becky Ceartas of Chapel Hill, a member of the group North Carolinians Against Gun Violence, was in the courtroom to observe and said her group was happy with the outcome. Ceartas said there was no reason to carry a gun to the fair.
“This policy has been in place for years, and I’ve never heard of a problem there,” she said.
Troxler, in the news conference, stressed the amount of security at the fair, to calm the fears of those who feel they need to arm themselves for protection. On a busy day, he said, there are up to 200 law enforcement officers on the fairgrounds, and the fair is ringed by 75 to 85 state troopers outside directing traffic.
“We want everybody to feel safe on these fairgrounds,” he said.
He also said that no matter which way the ruling went this week, there will be metal detectors at all the entrance gates. And after the fair, he said, he would go back to the General Assembly to ask legislators to be clear about what they think the law should say about guns at the fair.
“Either the legislature believes there needs to be concealed carry at the fair or not,” he said.
Valone noted that the presence of law enforcement officers had not prevented mob violence at several other fairs, including an attack in Arizona just last week.
“As much as Commissioner Troxler wants to believe his police can protect everyone, everywhere, they can’t, especially in the parking lots and the areas outside the fairgrounds,” Valone said. “They can’t be everywhere. The cliche is that when seconds count, help is only minutes away.”
Staff writers Richard Stradling and Andrew Kinney contributed to this story.
This story was originally published October 13, 2014 at 3:47 PM.