by: Dr. Steven Feldman, Libertarian Candidate US House NC District 10

Twenty-five years ago today, nearly three thousand Americans were killed. Office workers, flight attendants, passengers who fought back. Firefighters and police who ran up the stairs while everyone else ran down, and who kept dying for years afterward from what they breathed at Ground Zero. In the years since, thousands more Americans gave their lives in the wars that followed. They deserve to be remembered on this day, too.

Before 9-11, the United States imposed sanctions on Iraq. Reports in the medical literature said the sanctions caused the death of 500,000 Iraqi children. Perhaps the reports overestimated the number. Maybe it was only 50,000, or maybe only 5,000, still more than were killed on 9-11. In 1996, Lesley Stahl asked Bill Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations, Madeleine Albright, about reports that, “half a million children have died…that’s more children than died in Hiroshima…is the price worth it?” 

Albright didn't dispute the number. She said, "This is a very hard choice.  But the price, we think the price is worth it." She went on to become Clinton’s Secretary of State.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iFYaeoE3n4

We are told they hate us for our freedom. Why would anyone hate us for our freedom? Bin Laden told us why he attacked us. He didn’t mention the Bill of Rights — he said children were dying under our sanctions, our troops were in their countries, and we supported what Israel was doing to Palestinian families.

Nothing justifies the violence we suffered on September 11th.

We should not support killing. Not the Americans who died, and not the Iraqi children or other families who died before September 11.

It’s not just the deaths of civilians we should mourn. The young soldiers we sent to Iraq and Afghanistan were not evil, and neither were those who fought them. Soldiers are people willing to sacrifice to protect people they love. That's the tragedy. The violence, the war, isn’t driven or waged by evil people, just really, really good, well-meaning, caring people who think violence is the solution. Bush and Bin Laden both said basically the same thing: I hate violence, but it’s the only thing the other side will listen to. Perhaps that’s why Jesus told us we should be peaceful even in the face of violence.

The lesson I take from this anniversary is that we need to redouble our efforts to be peaceful to achieve peace. It’s an approach we need now, as our country is in another war that is piling up more economic pain, high gas prices, and physical suffering. War is burning, dismembering, and killing children. Every person we kill is a parent, child or sibling of loved ones who will be angry and mourn just as we did on September 11th, 2001. And the war’s cost just adds to the debt we are leaving our children. We need to defend our borders, not kill people in other countries to make them live more like we do. More violence is not the way to leave our children a financially secure country, and it certainly isn’t a way to leave our children a more peaceful world.

by: Rob Yates, LPNC Communications Director

The "30th State Pledge"

Press Release on the 30th State Pledge

Let me give the North Carolina Republican Party its due, because it has some coming.

Credit where it's due, In March 2023, this same party did the hard thing. Governor Roy Cooper vetoed Senate Bill 41, which repealed North Carolina's pistol purchase permit — a 1919 statute that handed your county sheriff personal discretion over whether you were allowed to buy a handgun. Repeal advocates called it a Jim Crow law. A discretionary permit, in the South, in 1919, was a loaded instrument in the hands of whoever happened to be sheriff. Sheriffs continued to weaponize that power into this millennium, even to the point of being sued for their lack of responsiveness. The Senate overrode the veto on March 28. The House overrode it the next day, 71–46. Done. Law. The permit is gone and nobody has missed it.

So they can do it.

I started with that point, because the rest of this is not a story about a party that can't. It is a story about a party that won't.

What "Won't" Looks Like

Constitutional carry simply states that a law-abiding adult who can already legally own a handgun may carry it concealed without first buying a permit from the state and sitting through a state-approved class. Twenty-nine states have it. South Carolina has it. Georgia has it. Tennessee has it. North Carolina is the hole in the map, surrounded on three sides by the thingour own legislators keep promising to deliver.

Senate Bill 50 — "Freedom to Carry NC" — was filed on February 4, 2025, by Senators Danny Britt, Warren Daniel, and Eddie Settle, with nineteen more Republicans signing on as cosponsors. The Senate passed it 26–18 on March 20. The House passed it 59–48 on June 11.

Governor Josh Stein vetoed it on June 20. He did the thing a Democratic governor was always going to do, he told you in advance he would do it, and he did it on schedule. There is no betrayal in a man keeping his word to the people who elected him. We knew what we were getting with him, and there is zero utility in wasting more energy talking about it (y'all could've had Mike ROss). Put your disappointment somewhere it belongs.

The Senate overrode the veto 30–19 on July 29, 2025.

And then the House of Representatives — 71 Republicans, a chamber their party controls outright, with a Speaker their party elected — put the override on the calendar and quietly took it back off. Then did it again. And again. From August 26 to October 22, 2025, the bill was calendared and withdrawn over and over. By February 2026 the Wake Forest Law Review had counted nine scheduled override votes that never happened. On January 12, 2026, they punted to February 9. On April 6 they set it for April 21 and pulled it again. On August 10, 2026, Speaker Destin Hall told reporters, "Any bill that's on the calendar that has been vetoed, we intend to override at some point if we possibly can."

At some point. If we possibly can.

The Arithmetic is the Whole Story

Pull up the roll call from June 11, 2025. Fifty-nine ayes, forty-eight noes, and thirteen excused absences — ten of them Republicans.

Two Republicans voted no outright: Rep. William Brisson of Bladen County and Rep. Ted Davis Jr. of New Hanover County. Both are in their final terms. Neither is seeking reelection. Neither will ever stand in front of a voter again.

An override requires three-fifths of the members present and voting — not three-fifths of the chamber. Which means absence isn't neutral. Absence is currency. With Brisson and Davis voting no, the Republican ceiling is 69 ayes, and 69 only clears three-fifths if no more than 115 members cast a vote. Five Democrats have to be somewhere else that day.

Rep. Keith Kidwell, a Republican, says the real number of Republican holdouts is four, not two. That drops the ceiling to 67, and 67 only clears if nine Democrats are absent.

So the vote is hard. Fine. 

Kidwell went on record and said leadership won't schedule the vote before November because, "they're more worried about losing seats than they are about doing what's right."

That is a Republican legislator saying the quiet part into a microphone. Not the Governor's office. Not a Libertarian with a grudge and a Substack. A Republican, describing his own leadership's math out loud: a recorded vote on the Second Amendment is a liability in a purple district, and the seat is worth more than the promise.

Carolina Journal found that nine of the twelve Republicans who voted no or didn't vote at all represent competitive districts. That's not a scheduling accident. That's a strategy.

And it is the same strategy as 2023, when House Bill 189 — constitutional carry, same idea, different number — died in the Rules Committee without a vote, in a chamber Republicans controlled.

Two sessions. A bill carried by twenty-two Republican senators. One veto. One override in the Senate. Nine calendar entries in the House. Zero votes taken.

What you were sold

Go find your mail from 2024. Go find the door hanger, the text message, the Facebook ad with the flag and the rifle silhouette. Somewhere on it, in a font chosen by a consultant, it says defend the Second Amendment.

Nobody wrote defend the Second Amendment when the district is safe enough.

Here's what makes it worse: they're not even losing the argument. They're declining to have it. A recorded vote that fails is a position — it tells you who stood where, and it gives you something against which we can organize. Nine withdrawn calendar entries tell you nothing, by design. You cannot primary a man over a vote he made sure not to take.

The General Assembly can still act on this until December 31, 2026. Hall says they may come back after the election. Maybe they will. But a party that needed sixteen months and nine tries to not vote on its own signature bill has told you, in the only language politicians actually speak, exactly what the promise was worth.

So be specific

There is a version of this piece where I tell you to be angry. I'd rather tell you to be exact.

This November, seven Libertarians on the ballot for the North Carolina House signed the "30th State Pledge," the same short document, in public, with their name on it.

It commits them to support every bill that removes a barrier between a law-abiding adult and a firearm. It affirms the right the Second Amendment enumerates rather than grants. And it commits them to vote for constitutional carry in North Carolina — on the record, on the floor, present in the building.

It's one page. It takes ninety seconds to read.

We keep our promises. 

Seven Libertarian NC House Candidates Sign "30th State Pledge," Committing to a Recorded Vote on Constitutional Carry

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

September 10, 2026 (RALEIGH) -- Seven Libertarian candidates for the North Carolina House of Representatives have signed the 30th State Pledge, a public commitment to vote for every measure that removes a barrier to lawful firearm ownership and to make North Carolina the thirtieth constitutional carry state in the country.

The pledge takes its name from the map. Twenty-nine states have ended the requirement that a law-abiding adult buy a permit before carrying a firearm for self-defense. South Carolina, Georgia, and Tennessee have all done it. North Carolina has not.

The signers are Angela Humphries (District 3), Nick Taylor (District 25), Ed George (District 34), Wayne Cockrell (District 39), Lucas Everett Jones (District 40), Christopher Sessions (District 53), and Matthew P. Clements (District 56).

The pledge commits each signer to specific obligations, including supporting every bill that repeals permits, fees, registries and waiting periods; refusing to trade firearms restrictions for unrelated legislation; publishing their votes in plain language within thirty days; and — pointedly — being present in the chamber and casting a recorded vote on every firearms measure that reaches the floor.

That last clause is the one that distinguishes it from a campaign mailer.

Two years, one bill, zero votes

Senate Bill 50, the "Freedom to Carry NC" Act, was filed in February 2025 by three Republican senators and cosponsored by nineteen more. It passed the Senate 26–18 in March 2025 and the House 59–48 in June 2025. Governor Josh Stein vetoed it on June 20, 2025. The Senate overrode that veto 30–19 on July 29, 2025.

Then it stopped.

"Gun owners in this state have been patient to the point of being taken for granted and now dismissed by NC House leadership," said Andy Stevens, former Vice President of Grass Roots North Carolina (GRNC.org) and former NC State Director of Gun Owners of America (goa.org).

"A vote that fails at least tells us where every member stands. Nine withdrawn calendars tell us nothing, which is precisely why they were withdrawn. Gun rights voters welcome any candidate of any party who is willing to put this in writing, and we will be watching who signs and who finds a reason not to. Republicans should no longer expect they have the monopoly on our votes, especially with their history of abandoning us when time comes to cast votes on our behalf."

Republicans hold 71 of 120 seats in the North Carolina House. In the fourteen months since the Senate acted, House leadership has placed the override on the calendar and withdrawn it repeatedly — nine scheduled override votes that never happened, by the count of the Wake Forest Law Review, with further calendar entries and withdrawals through April 2026. Not one of them produced a recorded vote.

When the current short session began on April 21, 2026, members of the Libertarian Party of North Carolina joined GRNC members to personally remind NC House Speaker Destin Hall and the House Republican caucus to override Governor Stein's veto of SB50. Speaker Hall promised both GRNC President Paul Valone and Stevens that he would call the override vote, win or lose, to let the public know where the votes on this matter fell.

On August 10, 2026, House Speaker Destin Hall told reporters that leadership intends to override vetoed bills "at some point if we possibly can." He did not mention his promise to hold the vote, win or lose, to let voters know where the incumbents stand. He seems to have forgotten that promise.

In the two years of this General Assembly, not a single measure expanding the right to carry has become law in North Carolina.

"Nine people signed their names to a piece of paper this week, and the party with seventy-one seats still hasn't signed its name to a roll call," said Ryan Brown, Chair of the Libertarian Party of North Carolina. "Republicans in Raleigh have had fourteen months and nine chances. What they've produced is a calendar entry they keep erasing. Our candidates are not promising to win this vote. They are promising to be in the building when it is taken, and to let you see how they voted. That used to be the minimum."

The clock has not run out.

The North Carolina General Assembly retains the authority to take up the Senate Bill 50 override through December 31, 2026. Speaker Hall has indicated the chamber may reconvene after the November election.

The Libertarian Party of North Carolina is inviting every candidate for the General Assembly, of any party, to sign the 30th State Pledge. The full text is available at lpnc.org/30th_state_pledge.

"The pledge is one page and takes ninety seconds to read," Brown said. "If a sitting member won't sign it, that is also an answer. Gun rights voters have a right to know who stands for them or against them, even if current House Leadership protects them by denying a recorded vote.”

About the Libertarian Party of North Carolina

The Libertarian Party of North Carolina is a recognized political party advocating individual liberty, civil rights, limited government and fiscal accountability. The party is running more than 30 candidates for local, state and federal office in the 2026 election cycle, including nine candidates for the North Carolina House of Representatives.

For media inquiries or further information, please contact Rob Yates at [email protected].

-END-

Libertarian Party of North Carolina
Libertarian Party of North Carolina (lpnc.org)

Ryan Brown
LPNC Chair
Libertarian Party of North Carolina
Ryan.B[email protected]

Rob Yates
Communications Director and Acting Press Secretary
Libertarian Party of North Carolina

At a time when Unaffiliated voters represent the largest and fastest growing voting bloc in North Carolina, politicians in the NC legislature are proposing new obstacles for independent voters.

A North Carolina House Elections Law committee meets to review the proposed House Bill 958. This bill seeks to do reasonable things like clarify and streamline vote counting rules and make it easier for campaign committees to solicit small donations.