Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen Tuesday signed into law Gordon Senator Tom Brewer’s “constitutional carry” bill allowing Nebraskans who want to carry concealed handguns in public to do so legally without a state permit or gun safety training.
LB-77, which also covers knives and any otherwise legal “weapon,” takes effect September 10th. Nebraska is the 26th state with such a law. A federal background check is still required to buy a gun in Nebraska.
In signing it, Governor Pillen said he was upholding the promise he made to voters to “protect our constitutional rights and promote common sense, conservative values,” and he praised Brewer as the one “who led this charge and carried it through to the end.”
The bill has been a priority for Brewer since he came to the legislature 7 years ago, and he used the signing ceremony to praise its other supporters, citing “a lot of wonderful, Second Amendment-loving people here in Nebraska.”
The highly decorated retired soldier wounded multiple times in Afghanistan added that he couldn’t “brag enough about my colleagues here who could have said it’s just too much pain, but they knew we had to get the constitution back to where it should be.”
The constitutional carry bill ends the ability of Lincoln and Omaha to enact their own gun laws, such as Omaha’s gun registry requiring anyone in the city limits that gets a handgun has to register it at the police department.
Omaha has about a dozen ordinances limiting concealed carry permits, many of them based on drug charges and domestic violence arrests. Those ordinances will be repealed on September 10.
There are currently between 50 and 100 cases in Omaha of people charged with illegally carrying a concealed weapon. Those charges will be dropped by September 10.