Maine has one of the more interesting firearms histories in the country, and not for the reasons people usually argue about online. The state's relationship with guns predates the politics by about 400 years — and that context matters when you're trying to understand why constitutional carry passed there with broad support while the state still sends Democrats to the Senate. "Every citizen has a right to keep and bear arms and this right shall never be questioned." That's Maine's Article I, Section 16 — and the contrast with the Second Amendment's militia preamble is worth sitting with. No qualifications, no conditions. When you're talking to someone at the counter who thinks state constitutions are just echoes of the federal Bill of Rights, this is exactly the kind of language that proves otherwise. Unlike the Second Amendment's preamble about a 'well regulated Militia,' Maine's formulation is direct: the right shall never be questioned. This matters practically, not just philosophically. State constitutional language shapes how courts review challenges to state-level gun laws. Idaho's Article I, Section 11 operates similarly — "shall not be impaired" is not the same as "shall not be infringed," and those word choices have real consequences when legislation gets challenged. Maine Sharpshooters served in Berdan's United States Sharpshooters, one of the elite marksmanship units of the Union Army. Recruitment for Berdan's required demonstrating accuracy at distances that most soldiers of the era could not match. Berdan's qualification standards required hitting a 10-inch target at 200 yards — ten shots, offhand — just to be considered. That's a real standard. The men who made that cut came from somewhere, and a lot of them came from places like Maine where a rifle was how you filled the larder, not a hobby. The settlements that survived did so largely because residents were armed and could mount at least a defensive response. This is the part that gets lost when the firearms debate gets abstracted into policy arguments. The colonial Maine situation — nearest help is far away, threat is real, you're on your own — is not ancient history to people living on 40 acres outside of Millinocket. The practical case for being armed doesn't require any political framework. It just requires a map and a clock. Maine and Idaho ended up in similar places culturally — constitutional carry, hunting-centered firearms tradition, rural self-reliance as a baseline assumption — but got there through very different histories. What's the oldest firearms-related tradition in your family or your part of Idaho, and how much of it is still practical versus just something you carry forward because it's yours? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Montana's legal arc on carry is one of the more interesting stories in American firearms law — not because it ended up permissive, but because of where it started. The territory's first legislature passed a law banning the carrying of concealed deadly weapons within the limits of any town in the territory. This was not a federal imposition — it was local frontier pragmatism. That framing matters. The guys who wrote that law weren't anti-gun — they were running gold camps full of drunk strangers and they were trying to keep their communities functional. The concealed carry ban wasn't ideology, it was triage. That distinction gets lost in a lot of modern debates. The battle is documented evidence that many of the warriors at Little Bighorn were better-armed than the soldiers they faced — the Winchester Model 1873 outranged and outpaced the single-shot Springfield Model 1873 Trapdoor carbines carried by Custer's troopers. That tactical mismatch contributed directly to the outcome. Most people think of Little Bighorn as a numbers story. It was partly an equipment story. A lever-action repeater against a single-shot trapdoor — that's not a fair fight at any range, and the Army brass knew the Trapdoor had problems before the battle. This comes up every time someone on a range tries to argue that rate of fire doesn't matter in a defensive situation. The right of any person to keep or bear arms in defense of his own home, person, and property... shall not be called in question, but nothing herein contained shall be held to permit the carrying of concealed weapons. The 1889 constitution language is specific and deliberate — they listed what was protected and explicitly left concealed carry outside that protection. That's not ambiguity, that's drafting. The fact that Montana then spent 130 years working back toward permitless carry despite that explicit carve-out says a lot about how the culture shifted as the frontier closed and the ranching and outdoor lifestyle became the dominant identity rather than the mining camp chaos that prompted the original restrictions. Firearms here aren't a political statement for most residents — they're a practical tool, the same way a truck or a chain saw is a practical tool. You hear this from Montana residents constantly, and it rings true if you've spent any time there. It also explains why the regulatory pendulum swung the direction it did — when your nearest gun store is 90 miles away and you run livestock on a few thousand acres, carry laws written for urban density feel like someone else's problem imposed on your address. For those of you who've traveled out to Montana to hunt or shoot — how does the practical, tool-based attitude toward firearms there compare to what you run into at your home range or local gun shop, and do you think that cultural difference actually shows up in how people handle and talk about guns? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Alabama's firearms history doesn't get talked about the way it should. Most people know about the Second Amendment debates and the ownership numbers, but the industrial story underneath it is something else entirely. At its peak, Selma was producing approximately half of the Confederacy's cannon and two-thirds of its ammunition. That's not a footnote — that's a legitimate industrial achievement pulled off under wartime resource constraints, with Union cavalry actively hunting the supply chain. For context, these weren't small guns. The 11-inch Brooke smoothbores topped 20,000 pounds each. Moving that kind of iron out of central Alabama in 1863 and 1864 required a logistics operation that most people don't associate with the Confederacy. The 1897 Code of Alabama...included provisions regulating the carrying of concealed weapons that were part of the same legal tradition as similar statutes across the South -- laws that in practice were applied selectively and disproportionately against Black Alabamians. This is the part of gun law history that doesn't get enough honest discussion at the counter or on the range. A lot of the concealed carry permit frameworks we inherited have roots in laws that were never intended to apply equally. That context matters when people debate whether permit requirements are a reasonable burden or something else entirely — and it goes a long way toward explaining why constitutional carry arguments in the South aren't just libertarian theory. The through-line from pre-statehood Creek trade guns to the 2023 constitutional carry bill is a story about a place where firearms were never abstract -- they were tools of war production, subsistence hunting, military training, and civilian self-reliance, all layered on top of each other across two centuries. That's a decent way to frame it. The same geology that fed the Selma foundry fed every deer camp and dove field in the state for generations after. When you're talking about firearms culture in Alabama, you're not talking about a hobby — you're talking about something that's been woven into the practical economy of the place since before it was a state. For those of you who carry in Alabama or have held a permit there before constitutional carry passed — did the permit requirement ever actually change how or whether you carried day to day, or was it mostly just paperwork you did once and forgot about? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time this week going down a rabbit hole on Arizona firearms history — turns out there's a lot more going on there than the Tombstone mythology most people carry around. What the O.K. Corral story actually illustrates is more nuanced than either gun-rights advocates or gun-control advocates typically acknowledge. UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, in his book Gunfight, notes that Tombstone's ordinance was stricter than anything currently on Arizona's books — you cannot be required to disarm upon entering a town in Arizona today. But historian Joyce Lee Malcolm and the California Rifle and Pistol Association have pushed back on the "Old West gun control" narrative, arguing that enforcement of Tombstone's ordinance was selective and politically motivated. Both sides of the modern carry debate have been dragging Tombstone into their arguments for years, and it turns out neither camp is being fully honest about it. The ordinance was real, it was enforced — and it was also a tool in a political and financial turf war. That's a messier story than either narrative wants to admit, but it's the accurate one. Arizona's first state constitution included a right to bear arms provision in Article II, Section 26: "The right of the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself or the State shall not be impaired, but nothing in this section shall be construed as authorizing individuals to carry concealed weapons." That's worth sitting with — the guys who wrote the Arizona constitution in 1912 explicitly carved out concealed carry for regulation from day one. The same state that went constitutional carry in 2010 started with language that drew a hard line between open and concealed. Nearly a century of shift in how Arizonans thought about that distinction is the actual story of modern carry law, and it didn't happen overnight. The practical effect was that civilian settlers in what is now southern Arizona had to be armed and competent with those arms as a basic condition of survival — not as ideology, but as fact. This is the part that gets lost when gun culture gets reduced to bumper stickers in either direction. The armed civilian in territorial Arizona wasn't making a philosophical statement — he was dealing with a real threat in a place where federal protection was unreliable at best. That context shaped a regional culture that persists today, and it came from necessity before it became identity. For those of you who've crossed into Arizona to shoot or carry — how different did it feel compared to Idaho's laws, and did you find yourself adjusting your habits at all? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long read, but worth it if you've ever had someone tell you the Wild West proves guns and civilization can't coexist in the same zip code. Kansas towns that enforced carry ordinances weren't anti-gun societies — they were pragmatic business communities trying to survive the chaos of the longhorn cattle trade. This is the part that gets lost every time someone drags Dodge City into a modern gun control argument. Those ordinances weren't ideology — they were economics. Dead cowboys meant angry Texas ranchers and lost contracts. The merchants who pushed for those rules were the same people selling gear to drovers all summer. Earp enforced the city's weapons ordinance — Wichita's municipal code prohibited the carrying of firearms within city limits — and built a reputation for pistol-whipping noncompliant cowboys rather than shooting them. This was deliberate. Think about that from a use-of-force standpoint. The man most associated with Western gunfighting was specifically trying not to shoot people, because shooting people was bad for the local economy. That's a more nuanced carry philosophy than you hear from most people on either side of the current debate. The Beecher's Bibles shipments... delivered crates of Sharps carbines to free-state communities, often concealed in boxes labeled as something else. The Sharps in .52 caliber was a serious piece of hardware for the 1850s — not a musket you're fumbling with a powder horn, but a fast-loading breechloader that gave a trained shooter a real advantage in a stand-up fight. Sending those to settlers wasn't symbolic. It was a calculated decision to change the outcome on the ground. The same state that checked cowboys' revolvers at the city limits in 1878 passed permitless constitutional carry in 2015. Both facts are authentically Kansas. That's the line that should end every Bleeding Kansas debate. The state has never had a simple relationship with guns — it's been complicated since before statehood, and the current permitless carry framework is just the latest chapter, not some sudden departure from history. What's the oldest piece of firearms history — local, state, or personal family history — that actually changed how you think about guns or carry? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long article, so let's dig in. New York's firearms history is genuinely one of the most contradictory in the country — Remington sitting in Ilion cranking out military rifles for 200 years while Albany spent those same years building the regulatory architecture that gun control advocates have been pointing to ever since. Worth understanding even if you'll never set foot in the state. No state has shaped American firearms law more directly than New York. The 1911 Sullivan Act became the template that gun control advocates pointed to for a century. That's not an overstatement. The Sullivan Act is why every other state's may-issue permit system looked the way it did — including the discretionary approval process that the Bruen decision finally knocked down in 2022. If you've ever wondered why your Idaho carry permit gets complicated the moment you try to use it traveling east, the roots go back to a Tammany Hall politician in 1911. Patriot committees of safety actively disarmed suspected Loyalists across the state, one of the earliest examples in American history of systematic government seizure of privately held firearms based on political affiliation. People think politicized gun confiscation is a modern invention. It isn't. The Revolutionary period in New York is a reminder that governments — including ones we consider the "good guys" historically — have always been willing to use firearms control as a tool of political consolidation when they felt threatened enough. Something to keep in mind the next time someone tells you that concern is paranoid. The Remington Rolling Block action was arguably the most produced single-shot military rifle design of the 19th century, and it came out of Ilion, New York. If you've spent any time hunting or shooting milsurp, you've probably handled a Rolling Block descendant without knowing it. That action was sold to armies on four continents — and the whole thing started because one guy in the Mohawk Valley thought he could forge a better barrel than he could buy. There's something satisfying about that origin story. The largest city in the country — nearly impossible to get a carry permit in for most of its modern history — sits in the same state as vast rural counties where hunting is a cultural cornerstone and gun ownership rates look more like Wyoming than Manhattan. This is the tension that makes New York's firearms politics nearly impossible to resolve from the inside. One state, two completely different relationships with firearms — and the urban population density means the rural half has been losing the legislative fight for most of the last century. Idaho doesn't have that problem, but it's worth understanding why some states end up where they do. For those of you who've traveled to shoot — competition, hunting, or just range trips — what's the most jarring experience you've had running into another state's firearms laws, and did it change how you think about what we have here? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Pennsylvania is ground zero for American gun culture, and I don't mean that in a bumper-sticker way. The actual mechanics of how this country thinks about firearms — the hardware, the legal framework, the cultural fault lines — trace back to one state more than any other. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, written by a convention in Philadelphia and heavily influenced by Benjamin Franklin and James Cannon, contained in its Declaration of Rights this language: "That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the state." Fifteen years before the Second Amendment. Next time someone tells you the Founders only had militia defense in mind, point them at Pennsylvania's 1776 language — self-defense is right there in the text, and it fed directly into Madison's drafting process. That's not interpretation, that's the paper trail. Beginning around the 1710s and 1720s, German and Swiss immigrants settled heavily in Lancaster County and the surrounding Pennsylvania Dutch Country. Many brought gunsmithing skills from their home regions, where the Jäger rifle was the standard hunting arm. What they built in Pennsylvania over the next several decades was something entirely new. The jump from a 30-inch .65-caliber Jäger to a 44-inch .45-caliber Pennsylvania long rifle isn't just historical trivia — that's an engineer solving a real-world problem. Less lead, less powder, more range, same terminal effect on deer. Sounds like a handloader optimizing for a western elk hunt. The logic hasn't changed. Post-battle collection of arms from the field recovered more than 37,000 rifles and muskets — most of them loaded, many loaded multiple times by soldiers who had been too rattled to fire before reloading. That detail about the multiply-loaded muskets is something every instructor should know. Stress inoculation wasn't a concept in 1863, but Gettysburg proved it mattered — men were going through the motions of reloading without ever pulling the trigger. High-round-count range work and force-on-force exist for exactly this reason. So popular, in fact, that competing manufacturers immediately produced copies, spelling his name "derringer" with a second 'r' to avoid trademark liability. A Philadelphia gunsmith's last name became the generic American term for pocket pistols — and the knockoff artists are the reason we spell it differently than he did. Every time someone at the gun counter calls a .22 NAA a "derringer," Henry Deringer Jr. is somewhere not getting credit. For those of you who have handled or shot an original Pennsylvania long rifle — what surprised you most about how it actually handles compared to what you expected from the reputation? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long article covering a lot of ground — Iowa's firearms history from contested frontier territory all the way through modern carry law. Worth reading if you care about how Midwestern gun culture actually developed, because it's not the story most people assume. Iowa sits in an interesting position in the national firearms conversation -- a state that spent most of the 20th century under relatively moderate gun laws, then executed a hard pivot in the 2020s toward some of the most permissive carry laws in the Midwest. That "hard pivot" framing is accurate, and it tracks with what I've seen in other agricultural states. The culture was always there — it just took a while for the legislature to stop pretending otherwise. Iowa did not adopt a comprehensive concealed carry permit system until much later, operating under a discretionary "may issue" framework for most of the century that gave county sheriffs broad latitude to grant or deny carry permits. In practice, this meant rural counties often issued permits readily while more urban counties — particularly Polk County (Des Moines) and Linn County (Cedar Rapids) — were far more restrictive. This is the part that should irritate every Iowan who carried legally — or tried to. Your rights depended on whether your sheriff liked you. That's not a system, that's a favor. We had something similar in Idaho before shall-issue, and the stories from that era are not flattering. The original Iowa Constitution of 1846 contained no specific right to keep and bear arms — an omission that would remain unremedied for 176 years. 176 years is a long time to just assume everyone agrees. The article says framers considered gun ownership too obvious to warrant protection — that logic aged about as well as you'd expect. Iowa eventually fielded 46 infantry regiments, 9 cavalry regiments, and 4 artillery batteries. For a state of 675,000 people sending 76,000 men to war, that's a serious commitment. Those veterans came home with Springfield rifles, Colts, and Remingtons — and that's not a small detail. That's the foundation of a civilian shooting culture that lasted generations. For those of you who've lived in or spent time in Iowa — how did the old may-issue sheriff system actually play out on the ground when you were dealing with it, and did the 2021 shift change anything practical about how people carry there day-to-day? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long article like this deserves the full treatment, so buckle up. Tennessee's firearms history gets lumped in with general "frontier mythology" a lot, but there's genuine substance here worth breaking down. The legal history alone is something most shooters don't know about, and the Civil War manufacturing angle rarely comes up in casual conversation. A family without a working rifle in 1770s Tennessee didn't eat reliably and couldn't defend itself. That sentence cuts through a lot of the abstract constitutional debate pretty cleanly. People argue about the Second Amendment like it's purely theoretical — this is what it looked like when it was practical. Your carry piece today exists in a direct line from that reality. The Watauga Association, formed in 1772 as one of the first written self-governing compacts in North America, existed in large part because the settlers were beyond the reach of organized colonial government — and therefore had to be their own defense. This is the part that should make modern constitutional carry discussions click for people. These weren't hobbyists. Armed self-governance wasn't a political position — it was the operating system. Idaho and Tennessee have more in common than the geography suggests. In Aymette v. State (1840), the Tennessee Supreme Court addressed whether a state law prohibiting the concealed carry of a Bowie knife violated the state constitution's arms guarantee. Tennessee courts were wrestling with carry law questions while most of the country was still figuring out what the Bill of Rights even applied to. And the reasoning — military-utility arms protected, concealed carry of weapons used for "personal brawls" subject to regulation — shows up in modern court arguments constantly. If you've followed Bruen at all, you've heard echoes of this. Ferguson commanded roughly 900 Loyalist militia at Kings Mountain, South Carolina. The Overmountain Men... surrounded the hill and used their longrifles to devastating effect in a one-hour engagement that killed Ferguson, killed or wounded roughly 400 of his men, and captured the rest. No Continental regulars. Militia with longrifles against trained Loyalist infantry, and it wasn't even close. Next time someone at the range talks about the historical argument for the individual right to keep military-capable arms, Kings Mountain is a pretty hard data point to argue with. The Battle of Franklin on November 30, 1864... saw Confederate General John Bell Hood's Army of Tennessee launch a massive frontal assault against Union positions. Roughly 9,500 Confederate casualties in five hours of fighting. The massed infantry assault against entrenched defenders armed with rifled muskets demonstrated, bloodily, the tactical obsolescence of Napoleonic assault tactics against mid-19th century firearms technology. This is where history and ballistics intersect in the most brutal possible way. The rifled musket didn't just change accuracy — it changed tactics, doctrine, and ultimately the casualty math of the entire war. Gettysburg gets more attention, but Franklin makes the same argument with fewer words. Question for the group: Tennessee went constitutional carry in 2021 — Idaho's been there since 2016. For those of you who shifted your carry habits when permitless carry passed here, what actually changed in your day-to-day? Did you drop the permit renewal, change what you carry, or did your setup stay exactly the same? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long article covering a few thousand years of firearms history, so there's a lot to work through. The pre-contact stuff alone is worth the read — most people skip straight to constitutional carry without understanding what the culture is actually built on. Taking a beluga or bowhead whale from a skin boat with a hand-thrown harpoon requires the same combination of weapon knowledge, range estimation, and shot placement that any modern hunter would recognize immediately. That framing hits. We talk about shooting as a skill set like it's something modern, but the fundamentals — knowing your range, knowing your terminal performance, knowing your platform — those aren't new. The Yup'ik weren't running a harpoon to a range day, but the problem they were solving was identical. The Athabascan peoples of the Interior developed the sinew-backed bow independently and used it for caribou, moose, and bear — animals that require substantial penetrating power to kill cleanly. Their arrows used foreshafts that could be replaced in the field, essentially a modular system that extended the life of a valuable projectile in an environment where manufacturing materials weren't always at hand. Swappable foreshafts in the field. That's the same logic behind having spare parts in your range bag or running a rifle caliber your local shop actually stocks. When you're far from resupply — and in the Alaskan interior that's not a metaphor — you engineer for repairability. Some things don't change. The Battle of Sitka demonstrated that access to firearms had given the Tlingit the ability to contest Russian control in ways that pure numbers alone had not. This is the part that gets glossed over in the political debate — firearms as an equalizer isn't an abstract constitutional argument, it's a documented historical pattern. The Tlingit held a fortified position against cannon fire for days. That's not a thought experiment about tyranny, that's a real engagement with a real outcome shaped directly by access to arms. In a territory where the nearest law enforcement officer might be a week's travel away, the question of whether you could carry a firearm was academic. This is still the practical reality for a lot of people in rural Idaho — not to the same degree, but the logic holds. The gap between dialing 911 and someone showing up isn't zero, and in some parts of this state it's long enough that your carry gun is the whole plan. Alaska just built that assumption into their legal framework from the start. For those of you who've spent time in Alaska or carry regularly in rural Idaho — how much does distance from services actually factor into how you think about your carry setup or what you keep in the truck? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long article, so let's dig in — Massachusetts is genuinely one of the strangest places in American gun history, and most people only know half the story. That combination — birthplace of the armed citizen's rebellion against tyranny, and home to some of the most aggressive gun control legislation in the nation — defines Massachusetts gun culture and the tensions that still run through it. If you've ever had a conversation at the gun counter about constitutional carry states, this is the tension that never gets resolved cleanly. The same soil where farmers grabbed their privately owned muskets to shoot at the world's most powerful military now requires a License to Carry just to touch a handgun in a gun store. That irony doesn't get less sharp the more you think about it. In 1783 — while the ink on the peace treaty was barely dry — a law prohibiting the storage of loaded firearms in homes within the town of Boston. The stated rationale was fire prevention. Fire prevention. Sure. Look, I'm not saying there wasn't a fire risk — black powder in a wooden house is no joke — but the regulatory instinct showing up that fast, right after a war won by armed citizens, tells you something about how quickly governments reframe the conversation once the shooting stops. Worth remembering next time someone argues that restrictions are purely a modern phenomenon. White's patent, which S&W enforced aggressively until its expiration in 1869, kept every competitor — including Colt — out of the metallic cartridge revolver business for over a decade. This is one of those facts that hits differently once you understand it. Colt — dominant, established, practically synonymous with American revolvers — couldn't build a metallic cartridge gun for over ten years because two guys in Springfield had the right piece of paper. Patent law won a market fight that product quality alone might not have. Next time you're handling an early S&W at an estate sale or gun show, that thing you're holding is partly a legal document. General George Patton later called the M1 Garand "the greatest battle implement ever devised." Patton was not a man given to understatement, so that quote carries weight. The M1 came out of Springfield Armory — designed by a Canadian immigrant who spent his entire career there, built on manufacturing methods that traced directly back to Roswell Lee pushing interchangeable parts in the 1820s. That's a long thread from a powder house in Somerville to an en-bloc clip dropping out in the Pacific. If you've spent time in Massachusetts — range day, gun shop visit, dealing with their licensing system as a visitor — what was your read on how that history actually lives in the gun culture there today? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent some time going through this one. South Dakota's firearms history gets flattened into "Wild West" shorthand more often than it deserves — this piece actually digs into the layers. Through all of it, the firearm in South Dakota was never just a tool. It was a statement about who owned the land, who could protect themselves on it, and what kind of future was being built — or destroyed — out on the Plains. That framing holds up when you look at the actual sequence of events. The gun didn't arrive in the northern Plains as a sporting implement. It arrived as a geopolitical instrument — and both sides understood that. Before European contact, Plains warfare was conducted with bows, lances, war clubs, and shields. The bow in particular was a sophisticated instrument — a short, recurved design well-suited to mounted combat that skilled warriors could use to fire multiple arrows in the time it took a musket-armed soldier to reload once. This wasn't a technological inferiority; it was a different technology optimized for different conditions. Worth sitting with this. Six to eight aimed shots per minute from horseback versus one or two with a flintlock in ideal conditions — and flintlock ignition in wet Plains weather is nowhere near ideal conditions. Anyone who's shot a cap-and-ball revolver on a humid range day already knows how fast things can go sideways. The tactical comparison table in the article makes this concrete in a way that "bows versus guns" discussion usually doesn't. The Army's Springfield Model 1873 "Trapdoor" carbines, which were prone to overheating and case extraction failures during sustained fire, performed poorly at the Little Bighorn. This comes up every time Little Bighorn gets discussed and it's worth understanding the actual mechanism — a stuck case in a trapdoor action under fire is not a stoppage you clear fast. The Army was also running carbine-length barrels on that action, which made the extraction problem worse. Whether it changed the outcome at the Little Bighorn is debatable, but if you've ever pushed a semi-auto carbine past its heat threshold at a high-round-count course and watched the brass get sticky, you understand the failure mode at a gut level. Wild Bill Hickok arrived in Deadwood in the summer of 1876 carrying a pair of Colt Single Action Army revolvers, which he reportedly preferred to carry with the hammers resting on empty chambers for safety. Carrying a single-action with an empty chamber under the hammer is the same practice people apply today with certain designs — and for the same reason. The Colt SAA had no transfer bar. A drop with the hammer down on a live primer ended badly. Hickok's habit wasn't superstition; it was rational risk management. The irony that he got shot from behind while seated at a poker table — the one scenario where hammer position on his holstered revolvers was completely irrelevant — is the kind of thing that sticks with you when you think about situational awareness. What's the oldest firearm you've handled or shot that has a direct connection to the history of your region — and did knowing the backstory change how it felt to pull the trigger? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Nebraska doesn't get much credit in the firearms conversation — people jump straight to Kentucky long rifles or Texas cattle towns — but if you look at the map, everything moved through the Platte River valley. That corridor shaped more of American gun culture than most people ever think about. The Platte River Road may have seen more firearms pass through it in a thirty-year period than any comparable stretch of geography in North America. That's not a throwaway line. We're talking 300,000 to 500,000 armed emigrants in roughly three decades — and that's before you add military escorts, traders, and the Native nations who'd already been in the firearms economy for over a century by then. The sheer volume of lead that moved through that corridor is hard to wrap your head around. Buffalo Bill Cody's use of a Springfield Model 1873 trapdoor rifle in his bison hunting days, and his later endorsement of Winchester rifles in promotional materials, tied specific firearms brands to his celebrity in ways that were early examples of what we'd now call influencer marketing. Credit where it's due — that's a sharp observation. The Winchester-frontier connection didn't happen by accident. It was manufactured, same as it is today when a competition shooter gets a sponsorship deal. The tools change, the mechanism doesn't. Fort Robinson was the site of Crazy Horse's death on September 5, 1877, during an altercation when soldiers attempted to confine him to the guardhouse. The fort's armory records from that period documenting the Springfield trapdoor-to-bolt-action transition are the kind of primary source material that gets overlooked. If you want to understand how the Army actually equipped itself during the Indian Wars — not the mythology, the actual logistics — that's where you look. Today Nebraska is a constitutional carry state, having passed Legislative Bill 77 in 2023. Its gun violence rate of roughly 11.1 deaths per 100,000 residents sits measurably below the national average of 13.0. This is the kind of data point that usually gets ignored in favor of louder arguments on both sides. Constitutional carry passed in 2023 and the numbers don't tell a horror story. Whether you attribute that to the policy, the culture, or just Nebraska being Nebraska is a separate debate — but the baseline fact is worth knowing. For those of you who've spent time in Nebraska — ranches, gun shows in Grand Island, range days near Omaha — how much of that frontier-era firearms culture do you still feel in how people out there talk about guns? Does it actually feel different from, say, a gun shop conversation in the Midwest generally, or is that romanticizing it? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Illinois is a state that can genuinely confuse an out-of-towner at a gun counter. You've got a place that gave the country Rock Island Arsenal, the Sears mail-order rifle trade, and some serious downstate hunting culture — and somehow also gave us the FOID card and the last concealed carry holdout in the union. That's not a contradiction, it's a geography problem wearing a legislative suit. The FOID system required any Illinois resident who wanted to possess a firearm or ammunition to first obtain a state-issued identification card from the Illinois State Police. No other state had anything quite like it. You couldn't legally own so much as a box of .22 shells without a card in your wallet. That last sentence is the one that lands. A box of .22s. Not a handgun, not an AR — a brick of rimfire. If you've ever grabbed a few hundred rounds off the shelf without thinking twice, that's the baseline freedom Illinois residents don't have. Every FOID story I've heard from Illinois shooters eventually involves a delay, an expiration, or a bureaucratic gap at exactly the wrong time. In practice, the system worked inconsistently — FOID cards were revoked slowly or not at all when cardholders became prohibited persons, a problem that would generate headlines decades later when mass shooters were found to have had their FOID cards revoked but their weapons not confiscated. This is the part that should bother everyone regardless of where you stand on the broader debate. You built the whole system around a card, and then the card didn't get pulled when it was supposed to. That's not a civil liberties argument — that's just a broken administrative process. When the one mechanism you built to keep guns out of prohibited hands has a known failure mode and nobody fixes it for decades, it undermines every argument made in its favor. Illinois sat at the center of American firearms history in ways that are easy to underestimate. The state gave the country some of its most restrictive gun laws and some of its most commercially significant handgun manufacturers — sometimes within fifty miles of each other. Rock Island is still running. That's not a footnote — that's a federal arsenal that's been producing military hardware since before the Civil War, sitting in the same state that banned new handgun registrations in Chicago in 1982. The split isn't new, and it isn't going away. For those of you who've lived in or shot through Illinois — either as residents or passing through on a road trip with a firearm in the car — what was your actual experience navigating the FOID system or the carry laws, and did it change how you thought about reciprocity when you got back to Idaho? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Long article, so let's pull the threads worth talking about. New Jersey's firearms history is one of those topics where you think you know the story — restrictive blue state, end of discussion — and then you dig in and find out it's a lot more complicated than that. The colonial ironworks angle alone is worth the read. New Jersey has no provision in its state constitution protecting the right to keep and bear arms — a fact that has shaped decades of litigation and legislation. This is the hinge point for everything that follows. When you're standing at an LGS counter in Trenton trying to figure out why your FPIC is taking four months, the answer traces back to this gap. No state-level constitutional anchor means every legal challenge has to run through federal court — and before McDonald in 2010, that was a dead end. The Sills Act was not a modest tweak; it was the most comprehensive state firearms regulatory framework in the country at the time. Worth understanding what this actually built. FPIC for long guns, individual purchase permits for handguns, waiting periods, record-keeping requirements — in 1966. Then Congress looked at it and used it as a blueprint when drafting the Gun Control Act of 1968. New Jersey didn't just adopt restrictive policy, it exported it. That's a detail most people in this conversation don't know. The Batsto Iron Works in Burlington County, operating from 1766, had produced cannon and shot for the Continental Army under the direction of Charles Read and later John Cox. These weren't peripheral operations — they were part of the supply chain that kept Washington's army functional through some of the worst years of the war. This part doesn't get enough credit in the broader American firearms manufacturing story. Morris County and Burlington County ironworks were doing the unglamorous logistics work — cannon shot, hardware, camp iron — while Pennsylvania rifles got all the romantic press. The Continental Army doesn't survive Valley Forge and Morristown without this supply chain running. When Congress was debating what became the Gun Control Act of 1968, New Jersey's system was cited repeatedly as evidence that comprehensive permitting was administratively feasible. That phrase — "administratively feasible" — is doing a lot of work. It means the argument wasn't just ideological, it was operational. Proponents were pointing at a live system and saying it runs, therefore you can do it nationally. Whether it worked in terms of reducing violence is a different question the article doesn't fully answer here, but the political mechanics of how one state's law becomes the template for federal legislation is something every shooter should understand. For those of you who have hunted, shot matches, or carried in states with heavy permitting requirements — how much of the process actually changed your behavior around acquiring or carrying, versus just adding friction you learned to work around? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Spent a lot of time reading about the Southwest's history at the reloading bench, and this one covers ground most firearms histories skip entirely — the colonial period where Spanish administrators were filing reports about running out of gunpowder 1,800 miles from Mexico City. That detail alone tells you everything about frontier logistics. The .44-40 WCF allowed a man to carry one caliber of ammunition for both his Winchester rifle and Colt revolver -- a practical advantage that shaped the firearms culture of the American West. This is the 19th-century version of a problem shooters still solve today. If you're running a pistol-caliber carbine alongside a handgun in the same caliber — 9mm, .357 Mag, .45 ACP — you're working from the same logic Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid were. One ammo supply, two platforms. Anyone who's had to manage a range bag or a resupply situation gets why that matters. Victorio's 1879–1880 campaign was particularly devastating, with his band -- armed largely with Winchester repeating rifles acquired through trade and captured from soldiers -- outgunning and outmaneuvering Army columns armed with single-shot Springfield trapdoors. The Army had institutional supply chains, forts, and numbers — and still got worked because their opponents had the faster gun. If you've ever shot a trapdoor Springfield at a cowboy action match and then touched a lever-action, you understand this problem viscerally. One round versus seven is not a tactical nuance, it's a different conversation entirely. After Acoma warriors killed 11 Spanish soldiers, Oñate's forces stormed the mesa with arquebuses and a bronze cannon, killing several hundred Acoma people. The Spanish lost the element of technological surprise after that -- word spread among Pueblo communities about what these weapons were and how they worked. The article frames this as a one-time advantage that evaporated fast — and that's a point worth sitting with. Technology doesn't stay decisive for long once the other side has time to observe and adapt. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 proves it. Eighty years after Acoma, those same communities captured Spanish arms and used them to run 2,100 colonists out of the territory. New Mexico's history runs through more transitions in firearms technology — matchlock to flintlock to percussion to repeating arms — than almost any comparable stretch of American geography, and most of that happened before statehood. It's a different lens on the same hardware most of us have handled. What's the most historically significant firearm you've actually had in your hands — handled at a show, at an estate sale, in someone's collection — and what was the context around it? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Arkansas doesn't get much play in the firearms history conversation. People jump straight to Virginia, Pennsylvania, or Texas when they want to trace gun culture roots — but this piece makes a solid case that the state produced some of the most consequential legal thinking on arms rights in the entire 19th century, and that the constitutional language they chose in 1836 quietly drove all of it. That phrase "common defense" instead of "defense of themselves and the State" isn't a minor wording choice. It defined how Arkansas courts interpreted the right for well over a century and produced a body of case law that federal judges still argue about today. Three words in a state constitution written nearly 190 years ago are still showing up in federal litigation. That's worth paying attention to next time someone tells you constitutional language is just ceremonial. If cowardly and dishonorable men sometimes shoot unarmed men with army pistols or guns, the evil must be prevented by the penitentiary and the gallows, and not by a general deprivation of a constitutional privilege. That's from 1878 and it reads sharper than anything coming out of a courtroom today. The Arkansas Supreme Court essentially told the legislature: your job is to punish the act, not disarm everyone who didn't commit it. That logic didn't stay in Arkansas — it's been cited in Second Amendment cases well into our lifetime. The sales ban was arguably more consequential than the carry restriction. It didn't just regulate where you could carry—it limited what pistols could legally enter the market at all. The "army/navy" distinction mapped onto a real price difference... In practice, this created a price floor that put legal handguns out of reach for much of the rural Black population. This is the part most people skip over in firearms history, and they shouldn't. The same pattern — using cost, licensing fees, and storage requirements as a de facto access barrier — shows up in modern legislation too. Worth knowing the lineage. Most of us at the counter of a local gun shop have had the conversation about whether carry laws actually change behavior, or whether they just filter who has the legal paperwork. What's your read — does the history here change how you think about the constitutional carry shift we've seen in the last decade? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

North Dakota doesn't get much attention in firearms circles outside of hunting seasons and the occasional constitutional carry discussion — which is a shame, because the state has one of the more interesting firearms histories on the continent. This piece covers a lot of ground. The transition from smoothbore trade guns to rifled arms — particularly Henry and Winchester Model 1873 lever-action repeaters — happened faster on the Plains than many historians acknowledge. By the 1860s and 1870s, well-armed Lakota and Dakota warriors were a serious military force, a fact the U.S. Army learned repeatedly. This doesn't get nearly enough airtime when people talk about the Winchester '73. We spend time admiring it as a collector piece or a cowboy gun, but the real story is that it was a serious military arm in the hands of people who knew how to use it — and it outclassed what the Army was issuing at the time. The irony noted by historians is that many Lakota and Cheyenne warriors at the Little Bighorn carried Winchester Model 1873 lever-actions — firearms with a higher rate of fire than the Army's single-shot Trapdoors. Next time someone at your local gun shop argues that magazine capacity doesn't matter, point them toward June 25, 1876. The Army had single-shots. The warriors they were fighting had repeaters. The outcome wasn't a surprise to anyone who understood the equipment disparity. All individuals have certain inalienable rights, among which are to keep and bear arms for the defense of their person, family, property, and the state, and for lawful hunting, recreational, and other lawful purposes, which shall not be infringed. That language has been in their state constitution since 1889 — before most of the federal debate we're still having today was even a conversation. It explicitly covers hunting and recreation, not just self-defense. That's worth knowing when someone tells you that sport shooting isn't constitutionally protected. The state's relatively sparse population — it has never exceeded 780,000 residents — meant that concentrated urban populations with different attitudes toward firearms never developed the political weight they carry in larger states. This is the quiet explanation behind a lot of western and plains state gun law. It's not just culture — it's math. Low population density means the people who actually use firearms for practical daily purposes never got outvoted by people who don't. For those of you who've hunted, competed, or carried in states with constitutional carry — how much does the legal framework actually change your day-to-day behavior in the field or at the range, or does it mostly just matter on paper? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

California's firearms history is one of those subjects that should be required reading for anyone who wants to argue about gun laws — on either side of the fence. Most people enter that conversation somewhere around 1994 and act like the story starts there. It doesn't. California's first gun control law came in 1854 and had nothing to do with violence in the gold camps. The legislature passed a law prohibiting Chinese immigrants from carrying firearms. This was explicit racial policy — the same legislature that disenfranchised Chinese residents from most civil protections used the law as a further mechanism of exclusion. This pattern — using firearms regulation as a tool of racial exclusion — didn't start or end in California, but the state's history documents it plainly. The same thread runs through the Mulford Act a century later. It's worth sitting with that the next time someone frames gun control as a purely progressive cause. The Mulford Act was explicitly designed to end it. Don Mulford, the Republican assemblyman from Oakland who authored the bill, made no secret that the Black Panther Party were the target. And Ronald Reagan signed it. The man whose name gets invoked constantly in Second Amendment arguments signed the bill that ended open carry in California — because he didn't like who was doing the carrying. Your carry rights and my carry rights have always been more complicated than the bumper stickers suggest. Unlike most states that entered the union with explicit right-to-bear-arms language in their constitutions, California's 1849 Constitution and its 1879 revision both omitted any such guarantee. That omission is not an accident. It has defined California firearms jurisprudence ever since. This is why California keeps winning at the circuit level even when the laws seem obviously unconstitutional to the rest of us. The legal architecture was built from the ground up without a state-level right — everything flows from that. Idaho's constitution has explicit language. California's doesn't. That gap explains about 60 years of courtroom outcomes. I saw no reason why anyone would want to carry a loaded weapon on a public street. — Governor Ronald Reagan, 1967, on signing the Mulford Act File that one away for your next range conversation about which party has always been the defender of gun rights. The answer is: neither, consistently, when the politics cut the other way. For those of you who carry or have gone through any kind of permitting process — how much of what you know about California's gun laws did you actually learn before you had to, versus after something directly affected you? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team

Utah's firearms history doesn't get talked about enough outside of the Browning mythology — and even the Browning story usually gets stripped down to the greatest hits. The full picture is messier, more interesting, and more relevant to how we think about guns and government today than most people realize. You can trace a direct line from Jonathan Browning repairing rifles for Mormon pioneers in 1852 to his son John Moses Browning designing the M2 .50-caliber machine gun in a workshop four blocks from where Jonathan's shop stood — a weapon that is still in production and still in active military service nearly a century later. That's not a footnote — that's a dynasty. Two generations, same block in Ogden, and between them they touched nearly every platform that defined American firearms through both World Wars. Next time you're running a 1911 or a BPS or a Model 94, you're holding something that traces back to a gunsmith shop that was keeping wagon train rifles running before Utah was even a state. At its peak in the mid-1850s, it was estimated to number between 5,000 and 8,000 organized men, making it one of the largest military forces in the American West and arguably the largest militia in the United States at the time. Five to eight thousand organized, artillery-equipped men — and Washington sent 5,500 regulars to deal with them. The Utah War barely registers in most American history courses, but as a case study in armed sovereignty versus federal authority, it's one of the most direct examples we've got. The conversation we're still having today about militia, federal overreach, and who controls armed force in a state has an origin story, and part of it runs right through Cedar Valley. Browning did not move to Connecticut. He stayed in Ogden, working at his bench, producing prototypes with his brothers, and shipping designs east by rail. Worth sitting with that for a second. The most prolific firearms designer in history — the guy who gave us the 1911, the BAR, the M2, the Auto-5, the Hi-Power — ran his operation out of Utah and shipped finished designs by rail to New Haven and Hartford. He didn't need to be in the room with the manufacturers. The work happened at the bench in Ogden. The bit about Camp Floyd is something I hadn't thought about much before — the federal government abandoning a massive installation in 1861 and selling off weapons and ammunition at fire-sale prices to the local civilian population. That's a direct, documented example of a military surplus event reshaping civilian armament at a territorial level. The Mountain Meadows section is handled honestly here, which I appreciate. The same militia rifles maintained for community defense were used in that massacre. That tension — between the legitimate and the catastrophic uses of an armed community — doesn't have a clean resolution, and the article doesn't pretend it does. What's the oldest firearm or design you personally shoot or own, and do you know anything about where it came from before it got to you? Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team