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 Governor Roy Cooper vetoed Senate Bill 41, which repealed North Carolina's pistol purchase permit — a 1919 statute that handed your county sheriff personal discretion over whether you were allowed to buy a handgun.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.