20 Jun 2024

China has no favorite in Biden-Trump race, US intelligence finds

by | posted in: Politics | 0

Peter Martin | (TNS) Bloomberg News

WASHINGTON — U.S. spies believe China’s leaders see little or no upside to the looming electoral showdown between President Joe Biden and his predecessor Donald Trump.

Ahead of next week’s first debate of the presidential campaign, U.S. intelligence agencies assess that China has no clear preference between the two candidates, according to American officials, who asked not to be identified discussing nonpublic assessments.

The conclusion suggests that officials in Beijing, like their counterparts in Washington, believe that ties between the world’s two largest economies will continue on their long-term downward trajectory despite a recent increase in high-level meetings billed as efforts to manage differences. In recent years, the two countries have clashed over everything from technology to human rights and the South China Sea.

The U.S. assessment is matched in interviews with Chinese officials, who also spoke on condition of anonymity. They say the view in Beijing is that both candidates are intent on containing China and disrupting its rise.

“Neither is a perfect candidate, to put it mildly,” said Gao Zhikai, a former Chinese diplomat who served as translator to the late leader Deng Xiaoping. “Biden is a Cold War warrior who doesn’t care if he pushes the world into conflict, while Trump will probably impose sanctions and tariffs on China in pursuit of his America-first agenda.”

Spokespeople for the U.S. Office of the Director of National Intelligence declined to comment on intelligence assessments of how China views the 2024 vote. Asked about the U.S. elections, Liu Pengyu, spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, said China does not comment on “U.S. domestic affairs.”

A second Trump administration could pose significant problems for Beijing.

In his first term, Trump declared a trade war on China, increased high-level ties with Taiwan and oversaw a reorientation of U.S. military strategy to counter Beijing. By the end of his time in office, it was routine for officials in both Beijing and Washington to refer in private to ties between the nations as a new Cold War.

Chinese officials believe that a second Trump administration would likely be characterized by provocative pronouncements, unpredictable policymaking and a renewed push for anti-China measures, U.S. and Chinese officials said. During Trump’s campaign, he’s already floated the idea of 60% tariffs on Chinese-made goods,

Liu, the Chinese embassy spokesman, said that raising tariffs on Chinese goods would drive up the cost of goods, “inflicting more loss on American companies and consumers” while damaging global supply chains.

The flip side of these concerns, Chinese officials believe, is that a Trump presidency could weaken Washington’s ties with its allies, opening opportunities for Beijing. The former president’s first term in office was characterized by repeated friction with European allies over defense spending, as well as periodic complaints about the cost of the protection the U.S. affords Japan and South Korea.

One Chinese official told Bloomberg that Trump might also prove more amenable to doing deals than Biden, suggesting that Chinese concessions on trade could open the way for U.S. concessions over sensitive issues for China such as Taiwan.

But the prospect of a second Biden term offers little comfort to Beijing.

The central concern for Chinese policymakers would be Biden’s likely push to strengthen regional partnerships to push back against Chinese assertiveness, according to U.S. and Chinese officials.

Over the past four years, China has routinely denounced groups such as the “Quad,” comprised of the U.S., Australia, India and Japan, and “Aukus,” a defense pact among Australia, the U.K. and the U.S., as efforts to contain China. At a recent defense forum in Singapore, a Chinese delegate accused the U.S. of attempting to build an Asian NATO.

At the same time, Biden “needs to pay more attention to the views of its allies, which are likely to call for caution and moderation. This may be good for China,” Jia Qingguo, a prominent academic and standing committee member of Beijing’s top political advisory body, said in an interview this month.

Liu said the U.S.’s Indo-Pacific strategy “is essentially about division, confrontation and detrimental to peace” and that its aim is to “encircle China.”

U.S. intelligence leaders and senators have warned that a host of actors — including China — could also seek to influence the outcome of the election. In April, Secretary of State Antony Blinken told CNN the U.S. had seen evidence of Chinese attempts to “influence and arguably” interfere in the 2024 vote.

Still, officials from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence told journalists in a briefing that Beijing has so far taken a cautious approach to such interference because it’s aware of the blowback that such efforts might cause.

No matter who prevails in the November election, officials in Washington and Beijing are girding for more tense periods.

“From the Chinese perspective, we just need to sit tight,” said Gao, the former diplomat. “Whoever wins, China needs to deal with them as they are, rather than hoping for the unrealistic.”

_____

(With assistance from Rebecca Choong Wilkins and Tania Chen.)

_____

©2024 Bloomberg L.P. Visit bloomberg.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

20 Jun 2024

Donald Sutherland, the towering actor whose career spanned ‘M.A.S.H.’ to ‘Hunger Games,’ dies at 88

by | posted in: Politics | 0

By JAKE COYLE (AP Film Writer)

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Sutherland, the prolific film and television actor whose long career stretched from “M.A.S.H.” to “The Hunger Games,” has died. He was 88.

Kiefer Sutherland, the actor’s son, confirmed his father’s death Thursday. No further details were immediately available.

“I personally think one of the most important actors in the history of film,” Kiefer Sutherland said on X. “Never daunted by a role, good, bad or ugly. He loved what he did and did what he loved, and one can never ask for more than that.”

The tall and gaunt Canadian actor with a grin that could be sweet or diabolical was known for offbeat characters like Hawkeye Pierce in Robert Altman’s “M.A.S.H.,” the hippie tank commander in “Kelly’s Heroes” and the stoned professor in “Animal House.”

Before transitioning into a long career as a respected character actor, Sutherland epitomized the unpredictable, antiestablishment cinema of the 1970s .

Over the decades, Sutherland showed his range in more buttoned-down — but still eccentric — parts in Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People” and Oliver Stone’s “JFK.” More, recently, he starred in the “Hunger Games” films. He never retired, working regularly up until his death. A memoir, “Made Up, But Still True,” was due out in November.

“I love to work. I passionately love to work,” Sutherland told Charlie Rose in 1998. “I love to feel my hand fit into the glove of some other character. I feel a huge freedom — time stops for me. I’m not as crazy as I used to be, but I’m still a little crazy.”

Born in St. John, New Brunswick, Donald McNichol Sutherland was the son of a salesman and a mathematics teacher. Raised in Nova Scotia, he was a disc jockey with his own radio station at the age of 14.

“When I was 13 or 14, I really thought everything I felt was wrong and dangerous, and that God was going to kill me for it,” Sutherland told The New York Times in 1981. “My father always said, ‘Keep your mouth shut, Donnie, and maybe people will think you have character.’”

Sutherland began as an engineering student at the University of Toronto but switched to English and started acting in school theatrical productions. While studying in Toronto, he met Lois Hardwick, an aspiring actress. They married in 1959, but divorced seven years later.

After graduating in 1956, Sutherland attended the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts to study acting. Sutherland began appearing in West End plays and British television. After a move to Los Angeles, he continued to bounce around until a series of war films changed his trajectory.

His first American film was “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), in which he played Vernon Pinkley, the officer-impersonating psychopathic. 1970 saw the release of both the World War II yarn “Kelly’s Heroes” and “M.A.S.H.,” an acclaimed smash hit that catapulted Sutherland to stardom.

“There is more challenge in character roles,” Sutherland told The Washington Post in 1970. “There’s longevity. A good character actor can show a different face in every film and not bore the public.”

If Sutherland had had his way, Altman would have been fired from “M.A.S.H.” He and co-star Elliott Gould were unhappy with the director’s unorthodox, improvisational style and fought to have him replaced. But the film caught on beyond anyone’s expectations and Sutherland identified personally with its anti-war message. Outspoken against the Vietnam War, Sutherland, actress Jane Fonda and others founded the Free Theater Associates in 1971. Banned by the Army because of their political views, they performed in venues near military bases in Southeast Asia in 1973.

Sutherland career as a leading man peaked in the 1970s, when he starred in films by the era’s top directors — even if they didn’t always do their best work with him. Sutherland, who frequently said he considered himself at the service of a director’s vision, worked with Federico Fellini (1976’s “Fellini’s Casanova”), Bernardo Bertolucci (1976’s “1900”), Claude Chabrol (1978’s “Blood Relatives”) and John Schlesinger (1975’s “The Day of the Locust”).

One of his finest performances came as a detective in Alan Pakula’s “Klute” (1971). It was during filming on “Klute” that he met Fonda, with whom he had a three-year-long relationship that began at the end of his second marriage to actor Shirley Douglas. Having been married in 1966, he and Douglas divorced in 1971.

Sutherland had twins with Douglas in 1966: Rachel and Kiefer, who was named after Warren Kiefer, the writer of Sutherland’s first film, “Castle of the Living Dead.”

In 1974, the actor began living with actress Francine Racette, with whom he remained ever after. They had three children: Roeg, born in 1974 and named after the director Nicolas Roeg (“Don’t Look Now”); Rossif, born in 1978 and named after the director Frederick Rossif; and Angus Redford, born in 1979 and named after Robert Redford.

It was Redford who, to the surprise of some, cast Sutherland as the father in his directorial debut, 1980’s “Ordinary People.” Redford’s drama about a handsome suburban family destroyed by tragedy won four Oscars, including best picture.

Sutherland was overlooked by the academy throughout most of his career. He was never nominated but was presented with an honorary Oscar in 2017. He did, though, win an Emmy in 1995 for the TV film “Citizen X” and was nominated for seven Golden Globes (including for his performances in “M.A.S.H.” and “Ordinary People”), winning two — again for “Citizen X” and for the 2003 TV film “Path to War.”

“Ordinary People” also presaged a shift in Sutherland’s career toward more mature and sometimes less offbeat characters.

His New York stage debut in 1981, though, went terribly. He played Humbert Humbert in Edward Albee’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” and the reviews were merciless; it closed after a dozen performances.

A down period in the ’80s followed, thanks to failures like the 1981 satire “Gas” and the 1984 comedy “Crackers.”

But Sutherland continued to work steadily. He had a brief but memorable role in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” (1991). He again played a patriarch for Redford in his 1993 movie “Six Degrees of Separation.” He played track coach Bill Bowerman in 1998’s “Without Limits.”

In the last decade, Sutherland increasingly worked in television, most memorably in HBO’s “Path to War,” in which he played President Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford. For a career launched by “M.A.S.H.” it was a fitting, if ironic bookend.

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20 Jun 2024

Threats of terrorism in the US are ‘more diverse and difficult to counter’

by | posted in: News | 0

Jeffrey Fleishman | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

She wanted a rifle. He needed a soldier for his plan to overthrow the government.

Sarah Beth Clendaniel was a radical looking for a target when, authorities say, she plotted with Brandon Russell — a white supremacist who belongs to an organization known as Atomwaffen Division — to destroy the power grid around Baltimore. Clendaniel dressed in camouflage fatigues. Russell went by the alias “Raccoon” and, according to federal agents, kept a framed picture of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh on his dresser.

They communicated through encrypted messages, but the mission was foiled by authorities. Clendaniel pleaded guilty in May to conspiring to damage or destroy electrical stations in Maryland. Russell, who was charged earlier for possessing explosives, is awaiting trial. The case did not attract much attention outside Baltimore, but it was another reminder of the danger of terrorism in an unsettled nation.

The U.S. is facing security threats in a presidential election year coming from Islamic militants, far-right extremists, leftist radicals and an array of zealots disgruntled over the nation’s culture wars and our polarized society. Officials are increasingly worried about the deepening strands of left- and right-wing venom rooted in antiestablishment anger and amplified by social media that are testing the government’s ability to track militants like Clendaniel and Russell.

“The threat’s not more potent than it was around 9/11, but it’s certainly more diverse and difficult to counter,” said Colin P. Clarke, the director of research at the Soufan Group, an intelligence and security consulting firm in New York City. “We’re dealing with a more aggressive far-right, left-wing and what we call ‘salad bar people,’ who take a little bit of each ideology and thread them together. Incels. Q-Anon. The range of actors at play now is a lot broader than what we’re used to.”

The race between President Biden and Donald Trump underscores the prospects for unrest and violence. GOP senators have asked the Secret Service to keep demonstrators farther from the Republican National Convention at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee. Protesters are also expected to arrive en masse at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where in 1968, during an era of intense upheaval around the Vietnam War that some suggest parallels today’s political tremors, police beat and tear-gassed hundreds of marchers.

On a visit to Chicago this month, Secret Service Director Kimberly Cheatle met with nearly 100 agents who will be protecting both conventions. She told CNN she was concerned about a number of threats, including “the lone gunman.”

“You’ve got folks that are radicalized. You’ve got demonstrations that may pop up. And obviously, we hope they remain peaceful here, but they could turn violent,” she said.

Most of the violence and “other threat indicators [are] from groups that lean more conservative,” said Amy Cooter, a terrorism expert with the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey. What’s notable, she added, was that the extremist narratives, particularly accelerationist ones — like those espoused by Clendaniel that use violence to speed up social collapse — can appeal to radicals across the political spectrum.

“There’s potential for people who have very different underlying political beliefs,” said Cooter, “to join forces on issues they have common ground on.”

National militant organizations complicit in the Jan 6. riots, including the Proud Boys, remain a danger, Cooter said, despite arrests of its leaders and loss of a centralized online home since Facebook blocked extremist groups. Before the 2020 election, Trump told the Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by.” Reuters reported that after Trump was found guilty in May of falsifying business records, a Proud Boys chapter in Ohio promised “war” in a statement that read: “Fighting solves everything.”

Trump’s increasingly militant campaign speeches against immigrants and conspiracies about the “deep state” also resonate with other groups in the so-called patriot movement. The former president suggested in veiled language that his followers might rise up if he were sent to prison: “I’m not sure the public would stand for it,” he told Fox News. “You know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”

“Not all militia members like Trump. Some think he’s too brash, too old,” said Cooter, who spent years interviewing and investigating militia groups in Michigan. “But they are very responsive to his rhetoric because he appeals to their worries about immigration or about changing culture in other ways. Even if they’re not going to vote for him, their urgency around these issues gets stirred up.”

Today’s turmoil has yet to reach the magnitude of the late 1960s or the 1970s, when far-left domestic terror groups like the Weather Underground and Symbionese Liberation Army orchestrated scores of bombings. Many of the threats these days come from varied agendas, including Payton Gendron, who wrote a 180-page racist screed before killing 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., in 2022, and James Hodgkinson, a left-wing radical who in 2017 shot and wounded at least four people at a softball practice for Republican congressmen in Alexandria, Va.

In April, Kyran Caples, who police say was radicalized while at Fresno State and joined an obscure antigovernment group known as the Moorish sovereign citizens, shot and critically wounded two police officers in Florida. Caples was killed by police. In the plot to destroy the Baltimore power grid, the Justice Department quoted Clendaniel, once photographed heavily armed and wearing camouflage fatigues, a headscarf and a skull mask, as saying an attack “would probably permanently completely lay this city to waste.”

The country has been shaken by anger and unrest in recent years around the COVID-19 pandemic, mass shootings, George Floyd protests, an insurrection at the Capitol and pro-Palestinian rallies on college campuses. Those domestic ruptures have coincided with a rejuvenated branch of ISIS that is recruiting militants beyond its base in Afghanistan and this year carried out attacks in Russia and Iran that killed at least 220 people.

FBI Director Christopher A. Wray recently told cadets at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point that his agency was concerned about “a rogues’ gallery” of foreign organizations calling for violence against Americans. But he suggested that the more pressing danger comes from individuals and small groups in the U.S. who “draw twisted inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks here at home.” The agency, he said, has been “running down thousands of reported threats.”

He added that tensions around the Israel-Hamas war “will feed a pipeline of radicalization and mobilization for years to come.” In April, Wray, describing what he called a heightened threat environment, told the House Appropriations Committee that the agency’s 2024 fiscal year budget was nearly $500 million below what it needed. “This could not come at a worse time,” he said. “We need people…. Now is not the time to cut back.”

That threat landscape — radiating through a wide prism of anger and ideologies — has shaped America’s discourse and sharpened its divisions. The battles playing out in Congress have run parallel to social and political fervor around antisemitism, Gaza, abortion, immigration and gun rights unfolding on college campuses, state houses, podcasts, rallies and talk shows.

“The powerful emotions that have been unleashed aren’t fading,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert and professor at Georgetown University. “Terrorism never occurs in a vacuum. It always leverages off of the divisions, contentiousness and controversies that are in the political arena and that will lead to a very small fringe to conclude that violence is the only way” to overthrow a corrupt system.

The radicalization of the young is rooted in the generation that came of age during the isolation of the pandemic and has since seen governments as either powerless or indifferent to climate change, wealth gaps and stopping wars in Ukraine and Gaza. “This seeds a bed of frustration and mistrust,” said Hoffman, co-author of “God, Guns, and Sedition: Far-Right Terrorism in America.” “They’re looking to be entertained and stimulated rather than informed and confident that they’re getting accurate information. TikTok is feeding them what they want.”

When he was testifying testified before the House Appropriations Committee, Wray outlined the threats the U.S. faces from terrorism, cartels trafficking fentanyl, and cyberattacks on business and infrastructure.

“As I look back over my career in law enforcement,” he said, “I would be hard-pressed to think of a time where so many threats to our public safety and national security were so elevated all at once.”

©2024 Los Angeles Times. Visit at latimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

20 Jun 2024

Swing-state legislatures diverge on election-year gun measures

by | posted in: Society | 0

Amanda Hernández | (TNS) Stateline.org

States continued to diverge on gun policy this year, with especially intense debate in the swing states that will decide November’s election.

In Michigan, legislators are considering at least half a dozen gun bills that would create storage requirements and establish gun-free zones. In Pennsylvania, lawmakers are still debating measures that would ban sales of untraceable guns and gun parts, prohibit bump stocks and make some procedural changes related to gun purchases. Meanwhile, Republican legislators in Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina have sought to make it easier for people to procure guns and to carry them in more places.

This past week offered reminders of the continuing salience of guns in American life.

Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a 2018 rule — issued by the Trump administration — that banned bump stocks, which are attachments that transform semiautomatic rifles into weapons that can shoot hundreds of rounds per minute. The administration issued the rule after a gunman used semiautomatic rifles equipped with a bump stock device to kill 60 people and injure more than 500 others at a Las Vegas music festival.

And on Saturday, a gunman opened fire at a splash park in Rochester Hills, Michigan, injuring nine people — including two children. The violence came three years after a student opened fire at Oxford High School in the same county, killing four people and injuring seven.

Mass shootings that occur close to election seasons typically have a significant effect on the country’s perception of guns, according to experts.

“If there are any particularly horrendous shootings in the months to come, that has a way of pushing the issue back to the forefront of the agenda,” Robert Spitzer, a gun policy expert who has written six books and over 100 articles on gun policy, told Stateline.

Meanwhile, presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and GOP candidates nationwide have made crime and public disorder main themes of their campaigns — even though most crime measurements are trending downward.

Gun policy has been a topic of debate for decades, but has become especially prominent as the number of gun-related deaths and mass shootings has grown almost every year since 2014, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit group that tracks gun violence in the United States.

A Gallup poll from October 2023 found that the majority of U.S. adults, or 56%, support stricter gun laws, while 31% think they should remain as they are and 12% prefer less strict laws. Meanwhile, a Pew Research Center survey from June 2023 found that 60% of U.S. adults say gun violence is a major problem in this country.

Other states — including Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Ohio, Oregon, Virginia, Washington and West Virginia — also considered gun-related legislation this year.

Electoral impact

Voters who support gun rights are often highly mobilized and consistently turn out at the polls because of their strong personal connections to firearms, according to politics and gun policy experts.

In contrast, voters who support gun safety measures are harder to mobilize because they are more likely to prioritize other issues, such as the economy or foreign policy.

“A small but highly motivated minority can often win the day politically over a large but fairly apathetic majority,” said Spitzer, an emeritus professor of political science at the State University of New York at Cortland and an adjunct at the William & Mary Law School. “That’s kind of the short version of how you explain what’s been going on in gun politics in America.”

Extensive academic research and numerous studies can support either side of the gun policy debate. Politicians will use whatever data or studies that best support their platforms, according to political communications experts.

For example, left-leaning Democratic politicians often cite studies suggesting a correlation between stricter gun policies and lower crime rates, according to Jacob Neiheisel, a political science professor at the University at Buffalo.

But gun rights think tanks and organizations also produce research supporting their position, including the claim that crime rates drop when more people carry guns, Neiheisel added.

Experts stress that, regardless of party or position on gun policy, it’s important for people to understand how the data was collected and to be aware of potential biases.

For example, politicians often rely on annual national crime and victimization data produced by the FBI, but these datasets measure crime differently — a fact that is not always well understood by politicians or voters.

This allows some politicians to lean on the sources that best support their arguments on gun policy, according to Alex Piquero, a criminology professor at the University of Miami and former director of the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

“It’s not that the data are wrong. It’s not that the data lie. It’s just that there are different data measuring different things,” Piquero said. “But if the average person doesn’t know that or doesn’t take the time to understand … then they are an ill-educated voting populace.”

Campuses and polling places

In Michigan, legislators are considering at least half a dozen gun bills, including measures that would establish firearm storage requirements and prohibit guns in certain state-owned buildings and within 100 feet of polling places, drop boxes, early voting sites and absentee ballot counting boards.

“Being that we don’t want firearms at polls or counting boards is very reasonable and very much needed in the spirit of promoting democracy — allowing people to cast their votes without fear of intimidation,” said Democratic state Rep. Penelope Tsernoglou, one of the sponsors of the elections-related gun bills, in an interview with Stateline.

Tsernoglou said she expects both bills to pass this session. While they have already cleared the House and Senate, the bills await another vote in the House before advancing further. The legislature adjourns in December.

The Wisconsin state legislature, now adjourned, considered a handful of gun bills during its session. One bill sought to prohibit credit card companies from mandating specific merchant category codes for firearms retailers and prevent governmental entities from compiling lists of firearm owners based on background checks. This bill passed the legislature, but was vetoed by Democratic Gov. Tony Evers in March.

Another proposed bill in Wisconsin sought to ban firearms in buildings or on the grounds of publicly or privately owned colleges and universities in the state. This bill did not advance in the legislature, but Democratic state Sen. Kelda Roys, the bill’s lead sponsor, plans to reintroduce it during the next legislative session.

“We have now a whole generation of young people that have grown up with this horrible specter of gun violence following them through their education,” Roys said.

In Georgia, a measure that bans firearm purchase tracking was signed into law in April and will go into effect in July.

A proposed bill in Arizona would have allowed people with valid concealed carry permits to carry firearms on university and college campuses.

Another Arizona bill under consideration would have prohibited local governments from restricting or banning gun shows within their respective jurisdictions. The Arizona legislature has adjourned, and neither bill advanced.

State legislators in Pennsylvania are still considering at least six gun bills, all of which would further restrict gun purchases and ownership. Some of these bills would ban future sales of assault weapons, outlaw the purchase, sale and production of untraceable guns and gun parts, and reduce the time judges have to notify the state police about people with mental health records from a week to about four days for background checks.

While some of these bills have failed in the House, the Pennsylvania legislature adjourns at the end of November, so there may be more activity closer to the upcoming election.

Permitless carry

State legislators in North Carolina may consider at least two gun-related bills this session, with sponsors planning to reintroduce and garner support for their proposals.

One bill would make North Carolina the 30th state to allow permitless concealed carry or “constitutional carry,” meaning it would be legal to carry a concealed firearm without a permit.

The bill’s supporters point to FBI data in arguing for the measure.

“Crime rates go down when you have armed citizens. There’s no doubt about that. The FBI holds that up time and time again,” said Republican state Rep. Keith Kidwell, one of the bill’s sponsors, in an interview with Stateline.

The gun rights group Grass Roots North Carolina is pushing for the supermajority Republican legislature to pass the bill, arguing that there has been no increase in violent crime in any of the states that have adopted constitutional carry.

In North Carolina, people are no longer required to apply for a pistol purchase permit from a sheriff, but they must still go through the sheriff for a concealed carry license. Grass Roots North Carolina would like to see the state enact a constitutional carry bill to remove this requirement.

“We are particularly interested in passing [the bill] to make sure that we can keep some of these urban sheriffs from obstructing people from carrying concealed firearms for self-protection,” said Paul Valone, the group’s president, in an interview with Stateline.

The other bill would establish a so-called red flag law in North Carolina. At least 21 other states and the District of Columbia have similar laws, which typically allow a judge to take someone’s firearms away if they are deemed to be a harm to themselves or others.

Many gun rights groups argue that red flag laws infringe on Second Amendment rights and the right to due process.

“I don’t care which right it is, you don’t take away people’s rights without the due process of law,” Kidwell said, adding that he will work to prevent the bill from advancing.

Democratic state Rep. Marcia Morey, a former judge and the bill’s lead sponsor, told Stateline in an interview that the bill includes specific protections to prevent any infringement on due process rights.

“It’s just about keeping people safe, and the safety, I think, preempts any right to possess a gun,” she said.

Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a national nonprofit news organization focused on state policy.