Is it legal to ban guns at protests? Forgotten laws resurface at coronavirus rallies

A group of nine men armed with guns gathered Friday at a cemetery to protest North Carolina’s stay-at-home order before marching through downtown Raleigh.
But not before police met them, The News & Observer reported.

Officers with the Raleigh Police Department told the group that state law prevents people from simultaneously carrying weapons and staging a protest — a law protesters argued bucks the U.S. Constitution.

“I missed the clause that says you have the right to speak and the right to carry guns — but not at the same time,” one of them told police in an exchange caught on video.
They aren’t alone in their confusion.

The Constitution grants Americans the rights to assemble and bear arms under the First and Second amendments — but a handful of states prevent them from doing both at the same time.

According to a 2017 report by The Trace, a nonprofit news organization that covers gun issues, at least six states and Washington, D.C., have laws barring firearms from rallies.
They include Alabama, California, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland and North Carolina.

Others like Connecticut, Indiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Montana, New Jersey, New York, South Carolina and Tennessee allow firearms at demonstrations but permit local governments to institute their own restrictions, The Trace reported.

Another 36 states allow guns — concealed or otherwise — at rallies or don’t have a law explicitly forbidding them while also preventing local governments from interceding, according to The Trace.

That’s how armed protesters were permitted to “parad(e) around Michigan’s Capitol on Thursday,” where state law makes no mention of firearms being carried openly in public, Business Insider reported.