On a recent Sunday morning at a small target range in rural Frederick, Md., a handful of teenagers are shooting .22 caliber rifles. Inside an adjacent clubhouse, Perrin Lewis, a crane operator and part-time firearms instructor, presents a fact-packed, six-hour lecture about guns, gun safety and gun laws to a dozen men and one woman, each of whom paid $100 for a course that—assuming they pass a federal background check—will entitle them to receive a license to carry a concealed weapon.

The license, though, will be of no use to them in their home state of Maryland. To carry a gun there, they would have to take a far more rigorous test and then demonstrate that they have some reason for needing a gun (such as providing a “reasonable precaution against apprehended danger”). Instead, in a twist that speaks to the inscrutability of modern American gun regulation, their permits will be issued by the state of Utah, 2,000 miles due west.


Lewis, the sole proprietor of Genesis Firearms, is a genial but fervent firearms aficionado who claims to own 800 guns stored in 23 safes at his home in Waldorf, Md. He explained to me that the Utah permit has become the gold standard of concealed-carry permits because it’s cheap ($46 for residents, $51 for non-residents) and easy to acquire (you don’t have to go to Utah), but above all because it’s recognized by a total of 35 states. That’s why Marylanders apply for it, expecting it will allow them to travel widely with their guns.

Lewis, who says a private citizen “should be carrying a gun for the sole purpose of protecting themselves and their loved one,” always keeps a gun with him. Since 2009, he says, he has taught his “Utah Concealed Firearm Permit Course,” which I signed up for after seeing it advertised on the Internet, to more than 6,000 people. Similar classes have sprung up all over the country, from Maine to California, and today more than 60 percent of Utah’s half million active permits are held by people who don’t live in the state, says Jason Chapman, firearms supervisor at the Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification.

Even more striking is that while Utah might have become the diploma mill of concealed guns, it is far from an outlier. Throughout the United States, the once rare privilege of legally carrying a gun in public places has gone from almost impossible to surprisingly easy. (Virginia, for example, allows citizens to receive a permit over the Internet.) In a largely unnoted milestone, the right to carry became legal this year in the last of the 50 states when concealed weapons permits were finally legalized in Illinois, the last remaining state banning them. In 1981, 19 states banned concealed weapons, and of the states that allowed them, nearly all had onerous hurdles that gun owners had to clear in order to qualify for a permit. Today, only the District of Columbia and several U.S. territories prohibit weapons in public spaces and many of the once-challenging barriers to getting them elsewhere have come down. As of 2011, according to the Government Accountability Office, roughly 8 million Americans had gotten permits for concealed guns.

The new laws—and the number of people making use of them—are a testament to the success of a highly focused, well-financed effort over the last two decades by the National Rifle Association to push concealed-carry in every state legislature. Now, the NRA is working to build on that success by pushing Congress to enact a national “reciprocity” law which it claims will fix the problematic patchwork of state statutes that it maneuvered to enact. States such as California, Maryland, New Jersey and New York that rarely issue concealed carry permits and prohibit carrying by out-of-state residents would suddenly be required to allow any of the country’s millions of non-resident permits-holders—like, say, those licensed by the state of Utah—to carry their weapons. This federal "fix" of the NRA's would otherwise leave intact the problematic, crazy quilt of state laws.

In the aftermath of the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., the political media concentrated attention on President Obama’s campaign to strengthen federal gun laws. Meanwhile, though, the NRA’s little-noted effort to advance its concealed carry reciprocity measure came surprisingly close to passage this spring, falling just three votes shy in the Senate after having cleared the House of Representatives last year. Although it seems unlikely the NRA will have the votes to get reciprocity through the Senate before next November’s elections, it will almost certainly seize the next opportunity to bring the measure to another vote.

And so, as the nation marks one year since the tragic Sandy Hook shootings that put the issue of gun violence squarely back on the political agenda, the surprising result is that, instead of being poised for more gun regulation, we very well could find ourselves poised for even more guns. After I left Lewis’s class—with my easy-to-earn certificate of completion proudly in hand—I spent weeks plumbing the morass of confusing, conflicting state laws, and talking to advocates on both sides of the gun debate. It quickly became clear just how successful the NRA has been in creating the hash of loophole-riddled laws—and a panoply of “solutions” to undermine strong gun laws in the few states that still have them.

NRA leaders like Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre routinely complain that there are 20,000 gun laws across the country confusing citizens and making enforcement impossible. But in the year since Newtown, the NRA has been successful at the state level in enacting even more laws, including new concealed weapons measures in more than two dozen states that extend the right to carry guns in public spaces, including schools. Officials at the NRA declined my request for comment about their achievements this year, but in a recent letter to members, Chris Cox, who directs the group’s lobbying efforts, crowed that the NRA was able to “hold the line against the most sweeping threat to our Second Amendment freedoms in nearly two decades.”

Whether new laws or old ones, the absurdity of the crisscrossing statutes now on the books was impossible to ignore while I sat studying the gun regulations of Utah in the Maryland woods. Of course, Lewis is pleased to cash in on the opportunity to promote the laws of the Beehive State, a task he begins by plopping before his pupils a three-ring binder that contains 33 pages of fine print focusing on rights and restrictions of gun ownership. Dressed in a black and burgundy bowling shirt and matching Genesis Firearms baseball cap, he is emphatic that packing a gun legally can be tricky.

“Some states allow you to carry only one gun. Utah has no limit,” Lewis tells us. “In Utah [and 32 other states] you can go into a bar or restaurant and drink alcohol with a concealed firearm. In Virginia, you cannot.” In many states guns are barred in the workplace, he points out. But there are also 17 “take your gun to work” states—including Utah, where an employee can keep a gun locked in a car outside work. “In Utah you can shoot an intruder who’s trying to break into the living quarter of your house,” Lewis adds, emphasizing the words “living quarter.” “You can shoot through the door, but not if he’s in your garage. In Maryland he must first gain entry [to the living quarter] before you can shoot.” At one point Lewis asks us if we know when a gun is “loaded” under Utah law. I mistakenly assume it’s when a bullet is placed into the firearm. In fact, the law says a gun is loaded only when a bullet is in the firing position. So in Utah, a revolver can be “unloaded” even if five of six rounds are loaded or “chambered.”

Many of the Utah courses advertised on the Internet make explicit appeals to potential customers’ personal fears about safety. “Let’s face it, it can be dangerous out there,” squawks a pitch from a site called Helpmeshoot.com, as the theme from Dragnet plays in the background. Lewis’s website, on the other hand, is bland, and in class he takes a decidedly low key, just-the-facts approach. A self-described “happy fat guy”—“You won’t see me running 200 yards unless I’m trying to get the ice cream truck to stop” — Lewis was trained as a firearms instructor by the NRA, which also taught him his effortless rapid-fire speaking style.

He begins the course by telling us he’s going to concentrate on Utah’s law only—not the laws of the 34 other states that recognize its permit. And he tells us that we’ll learn only “the basics”—that the training he’s giving is “not enough,” that we’ll need more. Never mind that the Utah permit is of very little value to those of us in his class. Lewis avoids the technicalities and focuses instead on a pretty simple idea: The world is a dangerous and complex place, and a person is a lot safer with a gun than without.

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That millions of Americans might routinely carry handguns in public places is a historically novel notion. In 1987, Florida became the first state to enact a so-called “shall issue” law, meaning the state must issue a license to virtually any person who asks for one (as long as they haven’t been convicted of a felony or certain violent misdemeanors). According to the NRA, that law became the model for others like it.

Have Gun. Will Travel. But is it legal? Want to travel while packing heat? Good luck. Even if you have a concealed weapons permit, staying on the right side of the law is not so simple. To get a sense of just how complex this task can be, I examined 40 separate provisions of concealed carry laws in six western states—California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. All of these states, with the exception of California, have fairly lax gun laws—they either are “shall-issue” states or, in Wyoming’s case, require no license to carry a concealed weapon. (Wyoming issues licenses to residents who want them for interstate travel.) Nevertheless, the six states differ widely on who can carry a gun—and where. In Montana, the minimum age for a concealed carry permit is 18; in the other states it’s 21, except that Wyoming sheriffs have discretion on whether to issue to anyone over 18. Montana, Idaho, Utah and Wyoming all honor one another’s permits, but their residents are barred from carrying weapons in California and Nevada. In California, only in-state residents with permits can carry a gun. Nevadans can do so in their home state, as well as in Idaho, Montana and Utah. Once they’ve gotten their permits, gun owners are generally not required to register their firearms—except in Las Vegas, where residents must alert the Clark County Sheriff’s Department. Clear so far? It gets more convoluted. If you’re a Utah resident with a medical marijuana prescription, don’t even think about trying to obtain a concealed carry permit. But if you take oxycodone or other opiates, no problem. If you plan to visit national parks, you can bring your guns (except into restricted areas), thanks to an NRA-sponsored amendment that was tacked onto a 2009 credit card law. But knowing where those restricted areas are can be tricky in its own right. In Nevada’s Great Basin National Park, for example, 13 areas have been designated “federal facilities,” which make them no-gun zones. These include the popular Lehman Caves and its gift shop and visitors’ center, as well as various fire company buildings and offices. Also, there are no guns allowed in the park’s fitness center. Although Wyoming makes it easy for its citizens to carry concealed weapons within its borders, its tolerance for guns is not unlimited. Churches, government meetings and places where alcohol is served must remain firearm-free (California, Montana and Wyoming also prohibit the mixing of guns and alcohol). In Idaho, Nevada and Utah, there is no prohibition on guns in banks. And although the NRA has aggressively lobbied state legislatures to allow concealed firearms on college campuses, only eight states, including Utah, allow guns on campus. In Idaho, Montana and 20 other states, individual colleges make that decision. All states allow private business owners to bar firearms, but in some states they must post a sign stating their aversion to guns and risk ruffling the feathers of concealed-carry diehards, who encourage boycotts of these establishments. (AMC Theaters, Bank of America, California Pizza Kitchen, CVS, Hooters, Ikea and Jack in the Box have all earned the ire of gun groups at various points for not allowing firearms.) Finally, a traveler in these six states should know that guns are banned in buildings owned or leased by the federal government. And good luck identifying them—there are upwards of a half a million.

By the early 1990s, the gun group had made enactment of shall-issue laws its top priority. And it enjoyed phenomenal success—even in the face of public opposition. In Texas and Louisiana, which enacted shall-issue laws in 1995 and 1996, respectively, independent Mason-Dixon polls had shown only months beforehand that a majority of citizens were opposed to the more permissive concealed carry laws. Today there are 41 shall-issue states (including four states — Alaska, Arizona, Vermont and Wyoming —that require no permit at all). Nine “may-issue” states give some discretion to sheriffs and other authorities to deny permits to people who can’t demonstrate that they need to carry a gun in public places for self-defense or are disqualified for reasons such as public drunkenness and domestic violence. In California, for example, the applicant must be “of good moral character” and demonstrate “good cause” to carry a concealed weapon. In New Jersey, a licensee must convince authorities that he or she faces “a special danger to life that cannot be avoided.”

In many states, loopholes abound to sidestep some of the hurdles to getting a permit. Some states grant concealed weapon licenses without any classroom or live fire training to anyone who has served in the military.

Clever loopholes in state laws have helped even Lewis, who has concealed weapons permits in 16 states. To qualify for his South Carolina license—which he said he got in order to carry a gun on drives between Maryland and Florida—he had to establish residency there, which he did by buying a “tent share” for a $700 fee and $75 per year in maintenance charges. The concept is similar to a time share for a condo, except all Lewis gets for his money is access to a patch of dirt at an old farm in the hills of western South Carolina where he can pitch a tent. He initially referred to the scheme as the “tent-share loophole” but then insisted, “It really isn’t a loophole.”

Indeed, getting one’s hands on a permit to carry a gun is, in many ways, far simpler than getting a handle on where and how that permit applies. State laws are in such conflict with one another that the NRA has warned, not incorrectly, that an otherwise law-abiding citizen stands a good chance of inadvertently running afoul of “restrictions they don’t even know exist.” To keep track of the labyrinth of legislation that the gun group itself has helped propagate, the NRA now provides on its website a “ Guide to the Interstate Transportation of Firearms,” along with a catalogue of state laws. Still, the NRA recommends that before concealed-carry permit holders head off on a trip, they find out about the local laws they’ll be subject to “by contacting the Attorney General office in each state through which you may travel.” And the gun group reminds its members that “for any particular situation a licensed local attorney must be consulted for an accurate interpretation [of the law].”

It seems unlikely, however, that many gun owners are checking in with a variety of state AGs and hiring multiple local lawyers before hitting the road. Perrin Lewis seems to have an encyclopedic knowledge of state firearm laws. Yet he appreciates that most people are less invested in the topic. “If you call three state police barracks in Maryland and ask about a particular gun law, you’ll get three different answers,” he told us at one point. “I hate to put it that way, but there are too many laws on the books for them to know every one of them.”

Of course, these problems are poised to grow with the exploding demand for concealed weapons permits. The Florida Department of Agriculture & Consumer Services, whose concealed-carry permit laws are some of the most lax in the nation, reported in April that license applications from 2009 through 2012 were the highest in the 25-year history of Florida’s concealed weapon licensing program. Since Obama was elected in 2008, the number of Floridians with concealed-weapons permits has doubled, and today more than a million of Florida's 19 million citizens are licensed to carry.

In Utah, applications for concealed-carry permits prior to the Newtown killings averaged about 6,000 per month. Following the Newtown incident, that number doubled, then tripled, with 13,000 applications in January, 18,000 in February,19,000 in March and the same number in April. In a state with 2.9 million people, more than 186,000 individuals, about 9 percent of Utah’s adult population, are now licensed to carry a concealed weapon.

Those numbers would certainly have spiked had the NRA’s federal reciprocity law been enacted earlier this year. But in April, on a 57-43 vote, the bill, which was sponsored by Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), went down in the Senate—just three votes short of the 60 votes needed. In response to critics who claimed his bill would weaken the gun laws on the books in many states, Cornyn insisted that his reciprocity measure would work in much the same way as a driver’s license: “If you are driving from Virginia to Texas, you do not have to obtain a separate driver’s license for each state you drive through, but you do have to obey the speed limits and other laws of the state in which you are driving.”

True enough. But it’s a safe bet that all of the states between Virginia and Texas require an eye examination to obtain a driver’s license, that none allows blind people to drive and that all of them oblige prospective drivers to demonstrate some knowledge of traffic laws and some ability to keep a vehicle on the road. And if one state did decide to issue licenses to blind drivers or require no hands-on driver training, it’s likely other states would stop recognizing its licenses. Yet when it comes to carrying concealed weapons, there is nothing in Virginia law—and the laws of numerous shall-issue states—to prevent a blind man from obtaining a permit. In fact, Virginia law allows a blind person taking a permit course to be assisted by someone else.

Under Cornyn’s bill, states with tough concealed carry laws would have to honor permits from states with weak laws. In effect, said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), the amendment would “favor out-of-state residents [holding concealed-carry permits] by requiring that they be allowed to carry a gun even though the in-state resident is prohibited from doing so.” Another opponent, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), noted that “at least 28 states grant concealed-carry permits to individuals convicted of stalking,” while seven states grant them to people convicted of misdemeanor assault and battery, 12 states allow them to go to individuals with no firearms safety training whatsoever and at least nine states authorize them for teenagers. Had Cornyn’s amendment passed, all of those individuals could carry concealed weapons in states where they would currently risk being arrested for doing so.

Standing under the fluorescent lights of his damp classroom, a mud-caked hornets’ nest suspended from the ceiling near his shoulder, Lewis had us watch a video he likes to show his students. On the television screen before us, we saw a federal Drug Enforcement Agency officer shooting himself in the thigh as he gave a presentation about gun safety to a group of children and parents in Florida. My classmates seemed duly impressed. But the message that Lewis wanted to impart—“treat every gun as if it was loaded”— might also have been made by mentioning other recent examples of people harmed by guns who ostensibly should have known better, including the Nevada concealed-carry permit holder who shot himself in the buttocks at a movie theater in August of last year, the Texas police officer who shot himself in the foot this past March and the Detroit woman who was shot and killed in July 2012, when she hugged an off-duty police officer whose gun went off.

Lewis, adhering with a poker face to the NRA-taught notion that it’s not guns that are dangerous but poorly trained gun owners, asked how many people in our class had left a loaded gun at home. Half the room raised their hands. As I looked around, I wondered—not for the first time—what these Marylanders intended to do with their Utah permits. When I asked them, they each told me they were concerned with self-defense. I mentioned to them that I was a freelance writer, and most of those I interviewed asked that I use only a first name.

One man in class, Brian, who manages construction projects in Maryland, Virginia and other nearby states, told me his decision to carry a gun was prompted by fears for his life. “I had a knife pulled on me just the other day,” he told me. “We do business in a lot of lousy neighborhoods, and I want to know that I can defend myself when someone’s trying to kill me.”

Mark, a geologist from Baltimore, said he frequently worked in “remote areas” in the West, adding, “I worry about some of the people I run into.” Robert, 27, the only African-American in our class, said he’s a trucker and, like many in his business, carries a gun for self-defense. The Utah license, he says, will make it legal for him to carry that gun, at least in some of the states he drives through.

Roxanne Thompson, 59, a spirited former minister and self-described “tomboy” with closely cropped silver hair, said she started thinking about carrying a concealed weapon when she learned that the man who had raped and sodomized her daughter was getting out of prison. Thompson said she wants to be able “to protect my grandkids, my husband and my dogs.” She insisted that her decision to carry a concealed weapon, which she says she’ll hide in her bra, is “not about fear,” but simply that “the world is not getting any safer.”

If Lewis’s course succeeds in providing some measure of security for people like Thompson, it won’t be because it’s taught her how to use her gun. The shooting range where Lewis convenes his class sits in a lovely forest clearing that provides charming environs for target practice—but the setting might as well be purely for atmosphere, since actually shooting a gun is not required for the Utah permit.

As in many other states, Utah’s concealed-carry law includes nothing more than a vague requirement that licensees demonstrate “familiarity with the type of firearm to be concealed.” Only 18 states require any live fire training. As for me and my classmates, we weren’t given so much as a written test. Lewis suggested several times that his students regularly practice their marksmanship and take additional classes. But when I asked him if he saw any problem with states issuing concealed carry licenses to people who might have no idea how to fire a gun safely, he said he did not.

Open In New Window OPTICS: The Sandy Hook Backlash: How the pro-gun community rallied after Newtown—and won. (Click to view slide show.)

“Personally I feel the right to carry a gun every day is your right, and you shouldn’t have to take a class at all, to be honest about it,” he said. He then explained that the right to carry a concealed weapon was no different, in his view, than the right to choose where you go to church. “But isn’t some sort of live-fire training essential to be a responsible gun owner?” I asked. “Well, that’s why I recommend additional training,” Lewis allowed. “A responsible gun owner learns how to use his firearm, but I don’t think that should be mandated by the state.”

Open In New Window Utah's application for a concealed firearm permit. (Click to enlarge.)

At the conclusion of Lewis’s presentation, I introduced myself to John, a young heavyset man who told me he was taking the class because, he claimed, his home was robbed by a gang member who had been recently released from prison and who now lived just down the street in his Baltimore neighborhood. John said he wanted the Utah permit because the state of Maryland refused to issue him a license, although he didn’t say why. Of course, under federal law, John is allowed to own as many firearms as he wants, and he’s allowed to use them to defend himself in his home—he just can’t take them into the street, according to Maryland law.

The fact that the Utah license is, at least legally, of no use to him didn’t seem to matter. He wanted one anyway. And if Lewis is able to sell the illusion of safety or the cloak of legal approval, he’s happy to oblige. Just like the NRA, he has an obvious stake in convincing people that there’s a simple fix to the jumble of conflicting state laws. Never mind that the only thing the proliferation of concealed carry permits really guarantees is that there will be more guns sold and more people carrying them.

More people like John, who left the Izaak Walton League clubhouse with an official-looking “Certificate of Completion” for the course, signed and dated by Perrin A. Lewis.

Alan Berlow is author of Dead Season: A Story of Murder and Revenge . His writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine , the Atlantic and Harper’s , among other publications. He is a former New Jersey state rifle champion.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story inaccurately reported that Virginia law exempts military veterans from background checks for the purposes of obtaining a concealed carry permit.