Republicans want to make it easier to carry a gun almost anywhere

In the 2024 election, pro-gun advocates coalesced around a primary request for President Donald Trump’s second administration: a dramatic loosening of concealed carry regulations nationwide, something that Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate have been vocal advocates of in the past.

National concealed carry reciprocity has become the main policy request from pro-gun advocates and the gun lobby in Trump’s second term. The policy would require states to recognize the concealed carry permits from other states, allowing permit holders from states with looser regulations to carry weapons in states with stricter regulations.

“I will protect the right of self-defense wherever it is under siege. I will sign concealed carry reciprocity. Your Second Amendment does not end at the state line,” Trump said in a campaign video last year.

The policy, as proposed by Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., would make concealed carry permits akin to driver's licenses in that a permit from one state would be valid in any other. For residents of permitless carry states, like Texas, all a gun owner would have to do is show that they are a resident of a permitless carry state.

While this policy has been proposed perennially going back years, gun lobbyists see the current Congress as their opening to push the policy through the Republican Congress and onto the president’s desk. Both Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.., and the Senate majority leader, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., have been vocal advocates for the policy in their time in Congress, with Thune introducing the bill in the Senate during Trump’s first term and Johnson advocating for the policy on the floor of the House in 2017.

“Our constitutional right to keep and bear arms should not be confined by state lines,” Johnson said in 2017. “It’s critically important to me that the fundamental right of every law-abiding citizen to keep and bear arms is protected. And yes, this legislation is about preserving our God-given freedoms.”

In the 119th Congress, Johnson has promised to bring the bill, which passed in the House Judiciary Committee in January, to a floor vote, where the bill has passed in previous Republican pushes for the policy. The bill has 182 co-sponsors, including one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, who helped usher through the GOP’s spending bill earlier this year. Johnson has not provided a timeline for when he plans to bring the bill to the floor and his office did not respond to a request for comment.

“There you have it, President Trump, Speaker Johnson and Majority Leader Thune are all lined up to pass the GOA-backed concealed carry reciprocity act into law,” a Gun Owners of America lobbyist, Ben Sanderson, said on the organization’s YouTube channel earlier this year.

While the current Republican leaders have all been outspoken advocates for the shift in, the Senate Democrats who have supported the loosening of concealed carry laws in the past have all left office. Even in past attempts with significant Democratic support, the filibuster killed the push, and it could do the same in 2025. The 2017 effort for the law ran aground in the Senate after passing the House without the bill even going to a floor vote, probably because Republicans understood they didn’t have the votes to pass it based on when the issue came up for a vote in 2013.

In the 2013 push for concealed carry reciprocity, the bill failed 57 to 43 in the Senate, with 44 Republicans and 13 Democrats voting in favor of the legislation. The problem for Republicans now, however, is that of the 13 Democratic senators who voted for the bill in 2013, only two remain in office: Sens. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., and Mark Warner, D-Va. Republicans would need five more Democratic senators to support the policy to get it through the upper chamber.

While Republicans have moved to attach changes in gun regulations to budget reconciliation bills in the past, there is no permitless carry provision in the current budget reconciliation bill that congressional Republicans are working on. They have, however, attached other gun-related legislation to the bill, namely a change to the way suppressors are taxed. A national concealed carry reciprocity provision would also likely violate the Senate's Byrd Rule, a policy implemented to exclude extraneous, non-budget-related legislation from the reconciliation process.

Nick Suplina, a vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, a pro-gun control advocacy organization, told Salon that he sees “real headwinds” that could thwart passage of the bill.

“It's because this is such a dangerous issue, because from even a state’s rights perspective, there's a lot to be concerned with,” Suplina said. “You know, in a city like New York, where I am, there are tens of millions of tourists every year. These are folks that don't know their around town. They may have heard on the news that New York is a dangerous place, even though it’s actually has one of the lowest rates of gun violence in the country. And they decided to bring their sidearm with them, and they’re lost in the West Village, or stumbling through Hell’s Kitchen, and that’s going to lead to really bad outcomes for them."

"It’s the lack of thought in a bill like this that makes it so dangerous," he added. "I think it's also what makes it so unpopular.”

Often, gun rights advocates compare the policy to someone with a driver’s license being allowed to drive in any state in the country. Suplina said that comparison would only work if some states were handing out licenses without “requiring a road test or any understanding of traffic law."

Suplina also highlighted how the policy would allow residents of permitless carry states to carry a firearm throughout the country without so much as passing a background check, a fact that has spurred opposition from law enforcement agencies from around the country, including in Texas, Louisiana and West Virginia.

The policy has also drawn criticism for the risks it poses to survivors of domestic abuse, something highlighted by Nashville District Attorney Glenn Funk when Tennessee passed its permitless carry law in 2021.

“We will see some disastrous consequences from the expansion of the percentage of the population that will have weapons on them at all times,” Funk told WPLN, Nashville’s NPR affiliate, upon the passage of the state’s permitless carry law. “We have had a number of domestic violence-related killings, and many of those, probably most of those, are gun-related.”

There are also Republicans who don’t think national concealed carry reciprocity goes far enough in terms of loosening gun regulations. Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., offered an amendment to the bill that would make it so that any gun that was legal to own in a given state would be legal to carry.

“[The bill] sets up a situation where if you are in a state like Kentucky that has constitutional carry and you travel to a state like California, which does not have constitutional carry, I can, I have in some ways more rights to carry a gun in California than does a California resident under the framework that [this legislation] would establish,” Massie said during the bill’s markup.

Lindsay Nichols, policy director at the Giffords Law Center, which advocates for policies to reduce gun violence, told Salon that, despite Republicans promising to pass the policy through multiple election cycles, concerns over public safety have always won out in Congress.

“This is a bill that's been introduced for almost a decade in every session of Congress. It's been a long-time priority for the gun lobby, largely because it does encourage people to buy guns. And the gun lobby is largely driven by the desire for profits of the gun industry, and they have marketed guns as useful tools for when you're out in public — for carrying a gun, for for all the situations that occur when you're out in public, meeting and interacting with strangers, despite the fact that we know that guns in those situations do pose huge threats, risk of escalating everyday arguments into fatal encounters.”

A recent analysis of 11 states that removed licensing requirements for concealed carry, conducted by the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, found that removing training and proficiency requirements for permitting was correlated with a 32 percent increase in assaults with a firearm. The policy is also historically unpopular, with a Pew Research survey from 2023 finding that only 24% of Americans support allowing people to carry concealed firearms without a permit.

Nichols also highlighted how eliminating regulations on concealed carry between states could serve to escalate situations like the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol riot.

“I think my biggest fear is that situations like this, in which carrying out firearms becomes more prevalent than it already is, and comes to places like D.C., is that it will present a real threat to democratic institutions. So this is not something this is definitely something that affects everyday people, and I don't want to minimize that, but that is something that's hanging over in the back of my mind,” Nichols said.