Questions arise over Indiana’s new permitless carry law

INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — There are 15 categories that prohibit someone from carrying a gun in Indiana.

Those include a felony conviction or a dishonorable discharge from the military.

Some of the information is readily available to the police, while other data about people is not. 

Without a state licensure program to vet who is legal to carry a firearm, police are prepared to see an influx of guns in public spaces.

“The fact that we know there will be a number of people that are carrying that really probably shouldn’t, but there is not a whole lot we can do about it. Just another part of being a cop,” Chief Randal Taylor of Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department said last week.

Under the new permitless carry law, police can’t just walk up to ask someone with a gun to prove they are lawfully allowed to carry it. The law also creates some legal challenges.

“I do think it does the question that I have is what are we going to do with people who are currently pending in the justice system with permit violations,” Jody Maderia, a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, said last week. “Are we going to let those individuals off the hook? It makes little sense to go after them for a permitting violation when the permit system itself no longer exists as defined by the Legislature, but yet at the same time perhaps these are people who should not be able to carry a firearm and that raises different issues.”

No central database is accessible to police at a moment’s notice with the names of people prohibited from carrying a firearm. Taylor told I-Team 8 that in the course of investigations involving firearms, police will have to conduct a limited background check.

“Things like being dishonorably discharged from the military, I don’t know that we have easy access to that,” Taylor said. “There are some things that have to do with convictions of domestic violence and those kinds of things. People who have been convicted of stalking. Those are ones that we may have to research before we make that arrest.”

During the permitless carry debate in the last General Assembly, Superintendent Doug Carter of the Indiana State Police told lawmakers that his agency had denied more than 10,000 carry license applications over two years. Under the new law, anyone over the age 18 who is considered a “proper person,” as defined by Indiana law, can freely carry a firearm.

How police determine who meets that qualification could be a challenge.

“I would say there is a going to a celebratory atmosphere,” Maderia said. “I would say it is going to take a little while before individuals who are not proper individuals try to carry, and it is going to be interesting how police ascertain who is a proper person and how this effects police safety.”

The new law does increase some of the penalties for violations of the law