NRA director: Constitutional carry has 'limitations'

COEUR d'ALENE — The increasingly popular idea of a constitutional carry gun right in Idaho might not be everything it's cracked up to be.

A representative from the National Rifle Association on Thursday didn't exactly give constitutional carry a ringing endorsement.

"I'm not opposed to constitutional carry," Dwight Van Horn, one of the NRA's 76 directors nationwide, told the Kootenai County Republicans at Fedora Pub and Grille. Constitutional carry, sometimes called permitless carry, would mean no government permits would be required to pack heat in Idaho.

"There are limitations to constitutional carry that you need to be aware of, if you're not already," Van Horn said.

Especially when leaving the state, he said.

"If you decide to have constitutional carry, where you have no permit, you cannot carry in another state," Van Horn said. "You're only allowed to carry in the state of Idaho, unless you get a permit that has reciprocity with other states."

Switching gears, Van Horn, a Hayden resident, discussed gun violence in the wake of the recent rampage at Umpqua Community College in Oregon.

He said school shooting statistics — 45 this year — are inflated. He said some incidents are being lumped in with school shootings to make the figures appear higher.

"If you look into them a little bit, you find that there's two people shot in the parking lot at 2:30 in the morning — that's not a school shooting," Van Horn said.

He also doesn't consider a shooting a half a block away from a school to be a legitimate school incident.

"We need to look into this stuff, especially when it comes from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., because there's a good chance it's not true," he said.

Van Horn denied that the NRA is beholden to the gun industry.

"It's nonsense," he said. "We have five million members in this country."

He did say, though, the NRA and the firearms industry have mutual interests.

"They sell guns because we can have guns, we're allowed to have guns," he said. "We're an organization that fights for people's rights to have guns."

As for the government taking people's guns, he doesn't believe that's a reasonable fear given the massive number of guns out there in Americans' hands.

He called "anemic" a recent estimate that the country has more than 300 million guns.

"I think you could probably close to triple that, and it still probably wouldn't be correct," he said.

He told the Republicans they could rest easy, too, because Congress has no appetite to pass any new law restricting Americans' gun use or ownership.

Van Horn retired from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department in 1999 after 28 years in law enforcement. The last 14 years he worked in a crime lab as a firearms examiner.

Separately, he worked for 17 months in Iraq in a crime lab as a firearms examiner, helping soldiers with incident investigations.