Alabama Firearms History: From the Selma Arsenal to Constitutional Carry

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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?

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Read the full article in The Handbook → | By The Boise Gun Club Team