Bump. If you get legislative news emails from DSSA, you will have gotten one last Sunday about SB 209 and SB 210, which are the criminal code rewrite bills. I had some concerns upthread about the legislative reports that led to the bills, one of which is dealt with in the bills, but most of the problems are still there.
The one that's dealt with is that the report was just silent about what happens to the CCDW licensing rules. SB 209 would delete the current rules and SB 210 would reinsert them, as near as I can tell verbatim; so that's a wash, and DSSA's concern there is that if one bill passes without the other, then the licensing regime goes away and concealed carry becomes illegal.
But a lot, maybe all, of the specific problems mentioned up thread are still there, though. The changes would still mean that a knife goes from being just a knife to being a "deadly weapon" when it's 3 inches long when closed, as opposed to current law of 3 inches of blade length. The offense of "carrying a concealed deadly weapon without a license" would become "carrying a concealed deadly weapon or dangerous instrument," and the defense to it stops being possession of a license and starts being "authorized by law."
The "dangerous instrument" language is a big problem. The definition in current law is already broad, but under the new law it will be a felony to carry a concealed "dangerous instrument" except as "authorized by law." Carrying a folding knife in your pocket, even a small one, is potentially legally the same as carrying a concealed pistol without a license.
And the changes to concepts like justification, mistake and excuse create a lot of room for mischief, and they're all still there. This project is the product of a law professor at Penn who is a bleeding heart liberal. For at least a century, liberals haven't exactly been friendly to the idea that decent people have a right to defend their lives, their families and their properties with deadly force, because that's terribly unfair to the criminal scum and it treats the criminal scum as unequal to the decent people. That trend in the legal academy has only gotten worse since the last major rewrite to the Delaware penal code in the 1970s. These bills are yet more incremental pressure toward turning legitimate self-defense into a reason to lock decent people up. These bills are bad news.