If Congress passes a federal right-to-carry law, New York tourists could find themselves able to carry concealed weapons around the city

With Donald Trump in the White House, tourists from other states may soon be able to bring their guns to shops of Fifth Avenue, the plaza at Rockefeller Center and other New York City sights.

Advocates say they expect Congress to finally pass a sweeping gun rights law that could dismantle local gun-carrying restrictions in states including New York, New Jersey, Maryland, California and Hawaii.

These changes could come soon. If Congress passes a federal right-to-carry law, it’s “certainly possible” that within a year or two, New York tourists might be able to carry a concealed weapon as they tour the city, said Robert Spitzer, a gun politics expert at SUNY Cortland.

Trump, who himself has a permit to carry a concealed firearm, has already endorsed a new reciprocity law as part of his gun rights platform. Concealed-carry permits from one state “should be valid in all 50 states”, his platform reads, calling the proposal “common sense”.

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Gun control groups call national reciprocity “a threat to public safety” and have pledged to fight the legislation, as they have done before. But it’s not clear how successful they may be against a united government, with Republican majorities in the House and Senate and a Republican president.

Gun rights advocates say the law would be a major victory for civil rights. Passing national carry reciprocity is a top priority for the National Rifle Association, one of Trump’s most loyal supporters throughout his campaign.

“We now have a president and Congress who understand that our fundamental right to self-defense does not stop at a state’s borders,” NRA spokeswoman Jennifer Baker said in a statement. “Our members and gun owners across the country look forward to the day when President Trump signs this important legislation into law.”

Adam Winkler, a gun politics expert at the University of California Los Angeles law school, said: “Right now, the NRA has got its way. It’s not clear why it would be looking for major compromises.”

Under current law, states have widely varying standards for what it takes to get a permit to carry a concealed weapon in public – and not all states recognize gun-carrying permits issued by other states. Logistically, this “patchwork” of state and local laws “is confusing for even the most conscientious and well-informed concealed-carry permit holders”, wrote Baker, the NRA spokeswoman.

Visitors to New York City have been routinely arrested at New York airports for attempting to check guns they were not supposed to have brought in the first place. In 2013, for instance, the NRA championed the case of Shaneen Allen, a mother of two and a legal gun owner in Pennsylvania, who was arrested and jailed for more than a month for bringing her gun into New Jersey.

Gun rights advocates view the widely varying laws, and the tight restrictions on gun carrying in places like New York City, as “a very heavy civil rights violation”, said Alan Gottlieb, the founder of the Second Amendment Foundation.

Advocates often compare the issue to driving: if a state driver’s license is valid in all 50 states, a permit to carry a concealed weapon should be, too.

“On its face, it sounds reasonable,” Spitzer, the gun politics expert, said. But the driving metaphor does not take into account the huge variations of different state standards for granting a concealed-carry permit, he said.

In Virginia, a brief online gun safety training course is sufficient to get a permit. Other states require more intensive firearms training courses that include a live-fire shooting exercise.

While many states grant permits to anyone who is not legally barred from gun ownership, states such as New York and California give local authorities discretion in granting permits, and require would-be permit holders to demonstrate a specific need for a gun. A few states even require applicants for a concealed carry permit to submit character references.

Reciprocity, Spitzer said, “would have the effect of gutting the stricter laws that appear on the books in many states. It would have a really profound change on what standards are applied.”

The Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence argues reciprocity would create a ‘lowest common denominator standard” for gun carrying across the country, “eviscerating state authority to restrict who may carry guns within their borders”.

What rights do Americans have to carry a gun?

Americans have the right to carry guns in public in all 50 states. Only a handful of states, including New York and California, require citizens to demonstrate a specific need for self-protection. ​in order to carry a gun. ​ Most states require that citizens get a permit to carry a concealed weapon, which often comes with gun safety training. But ten states, including Vermont, Maine, Arizona, Wyoming, and now Missouri, have “constitutional carry” no permit is needed to carry publicly. There are legal restrictions on carrying guns in some sensitive places – like schools, government buildings and bars – but even these laws are under attack.

Shannon Watts, the founder of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, called carry reciprocity “a dangerous policy”.



“The gun violence prevention movement has successfully defeated it before, and we will again, if necessary,” she said in a statement.

Paul Valone, the president of Grassroots North Carolina, a gun rights group, said he expected that gun control advocates would overplay the potential dangers of national reciprocity.

“I don’t think there’s any reason to freak out over this,” he said. Over the past decades, North Carolina has repeatedly extended concealed carry rights, he said. Each time, anti-gun advocates “have come up with predictions of doom and gloom, and each time, they are wrong”.

The exact form the reciprocity legislation may take is not yet clear, though the NRA has highlighted several different national right-to-carry reciprocity bills. Even among pro-gun groups, there’s debate over whether the legislation should create uniform, national requirements for carrying a concealed weapon, or whether it should respect states’ authority to set their own different standards, Gottlieb said.

It’s not certain whether the law would completely undermine local gun restrictions, allowing residents of places like New York City, which issues very few gun-carrying permits, to dodge local requirements and get concealed carry permits from other states with less stringent requirements. State governments might be able to find a way to block that kind of workaround, said Laura Cutilletta, managing attorney at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.

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Another issue is how to address the growing number of states – 10 and counting – that require no permit at all to carry a concealed weapon, a policy often called “constitutional carry”.

A national reciprocity law would still leave many other state and local gun control measures in place. Tourists from other states still have to obey local laws about where gun carrying is permitted, Cutilletta said. If New York City forbade carrying guns into bars, for instance, tourists from other states would not be able to bring their guns into a bar.

With “so much on the plate”, Congress is unlikely to pass the carry reciprocity law in the first few months of Trump’s administration, Gottlieb said. But he said he was hopeful it would be passed sometime in 2017.

The new law would be a “major victory”, he added. After waiting so long, he said, gun rights advocates were not concerned about waiting a few months longer.