ATLANTA — The Varsity on North Avenue near Georgia Tech is one of the most popular lunch spots in all of Atlanta. As it started to fill up just before noon on Tuesday, the first day of a sweeping new gun law in Georgia, there were holsters on the hips of some of the men who walked in for chili dogs, onion rings and cold drinks on a sweltering day.

But the holsters were for phones, not guns.

At 12:05 p.m., a man with a gun holster entered through the glass doors. Jerry Henry had a Kimber 911 on his hip. There were no shrieks or gasps or stares from patrons. No one seemed to notice.

“The biggest misconception is that everybody is going to notice a difference with this law, but you’re not going to notice a difference,” said Henry, executive director of Georgia Carry, a gun rights group. “There are very few things you can do now that you couldn’t do yesterday. The only change I could see coming is that you will be able to see guns on Sunday in churches.”

The gun law, which is called “guns everywhere” by anti-gun advocates but was called the Safe Carry Protections Act by the state legislature, will allow licensed gun owners to carry weapons, concealed or open, into churches, bars, schools and some government buildings, including libraries. Georgia has been ridiculed by some critics for allowing such sweeping changes in regard to Second Amendment rights, with anti-gun advocates fearing chaos. Georgia has also put into its legal code that a police officer may not ask a person with a gun to produce his or her license to carry the weapon.

But downtown Atlanta’s main drag of Peachtree Street was not suddenly transformed on Tuesday into some Western town with cowboys holding sidearms stalking the sidewalks. For one thing, it was a workday. For another, many government buildings have security checkpoints where gun-carrying citizens may be turned away.

Security officers at Atlanta City Hall made it clear no weapons were allowed inside. Security at the state Capitol across the street also would not allow weapons. At an Atlanta public library branch with a security desk, weapons were not allowed among the books and card catalogs. A man at the desk, instructing a security officer on the gun bill, said libraries may turn away patrons with guns if there is a designated security desk. The man would not give his name.

“It was OK for cities to allow criminals to carry [concealed weapons] into their buildings for years and years. So now that we are going to let the law-abiding citizens carry into the buildings, and suddenly, they say they need to spend thousands of dollars on security equipment and these desks,” Henry said. “They don’t trust their citizens, but they trusted the criminals. There was nothing to stop me from carrying concealed weapon a year ago into a public building.”

Henry said Georgia Carry is not going to randomly test to see if the law is being followed. If the group finds the law is not being obeyed at a location, he said, it will write a letter asking the establishment to conform to the law.