Concealed Carry in the United States: A Legal History
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Been shooting and carrying in Idaho for a long time, and watching this legal landscape shift has been something. Idaho's own constitution shows up in this piece, and not in the way most folks around here probably expect.
The constitutions of Kentucky (1850), Louisiana (1879), Mississippi (1890), and Idaho (1978) explicitly permitted their legislatures to regulate or prohibit concealed carry while protecting the right to open carry without a permit.
1978 isn't ancient history — that's within living memory for a lot of shooters. The state that now has constitutional carry had that language sitting in its constitution within the last fifty years. Worth knowing when you're having conversations at the counter at Sportsman's Warehouse about how this stuff "always" was a certain way.
most carrying is pragmatic, not political
That 2013 Gallup number — only 5% carrying to make a constitutional statement — rings true to me. Every guy I've seen at a carry permit class was there because of a specific incident, a bad neighborhood they drive through for work, a late-night gas station, a stalking situation. Nobody's holstering up to send a message. They just want to get home.
Research cited in the same source found that people who carried firearms at least once in the past month were three times more likely to have had a firearm stolen than other gun owners — a mechanism by which permissive carry laws may feed the illegal gun market.
This one deserves more attention than it usually gets. If you're carrying regularly, you're also making decisions about what stays in your car, what goes into a restaurant with you, how you handle transitions. A gun left in a vehicle — even briefly — is a real vulnerability. I've seen the "smash and grab, take the pistol" scenario play out more than once in this area. Retention and storage discipline matter whether you're pro-carry or anti-carry.
The shall-issue wave built from there: Washington had adopted the framework as early as 1961
Most people who follow this history think Florida 1987 was the starting gun. Washington doing it in 1961 is one of those details that gets lost — worth knowing if you're going to have an informed conversation about when and why this shift actually happened.
For those of you who've gone through Idaho's permit process or carry regularly — what actually changed in how you think about carrying once permitless carry went into effect here, and did it change your training habits at all?
Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team
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