Olsen: The Brutal, Lawless History that SB 116 Corrects

By Susan Olsen

During the 139 years before a United Textile Workers (UTW) strike at Manchester’s Amoskeag Mills, every New Hampshire resident had the right to own and carry a concealed, loaded firearm.

But nearly all of Amoskeag’s +/- 17,000 workers were foreign-born, un-naturalized men, women and children, recruited for work in the mills during the heydays preceding World War I. However, the post-war economic downtown began to manifest itself in reduced hours and reduced wages for the Amoskeag employees.

In February 1922, the fledgling UTW led the Amoskeag workforce out on a long, bitter and rancorous strike. When it ended in November, the New Hampshire Legislature - fearing another such union-led event could perhaps lead to violence and mayhem - devised pistol-licensing as a mean of keeping firearms out of the hands of people who looked and sounded different then they.

Enacted in early 1923, NH’s concealed carry license was modeled on the 1911 Sullivan Act of New York and equated foreign-born, un-naturalized citizens to felons, forbidding them forever from even possessing a firearm. Astonishingly, it also required NH-born citizens to obtain a license to carry a loaded firearm in a concealed fashion from local police chiefs who were given unilateral discretion in deciding which of them was “suitable”; criteria still undefined nearly 100 years later.

Despite two amendments to the New Hampshire constitution prohibiting such discrimination and guaranteeing the right of defense, state and local law enforcement still cloak arbitrary, capricious and even malevolent, denials of pistol licenses, violating of the rights of NH citizens, in the straw man clothing of “public safety.”

It is time to end these statutory aberrations by overriding Gov. Maggie Hassan’s veto of SB 116.

Visit areyousuitable.com/History.html for more information.

Susan Olsen is a member of the Women’s Defense League of New Hampshire and a former Republican state Rep candidate.