Progress in Right-to-Carry

Over the last 30 years, gun owners have made significant progress in having their right to carry firearms for their own defense.

You've all seen the NRA's map, but it gives little sense of the progress we've made.

I've pulled together what information I could find, and combined it in an animated map, so we could see at a glance how things have changed from year to year.

2004-11-03 - changed ID and WA pre-1989 from no-issue to may-issue, due to information provided by Clayton Cramer.

2007-12-01 - released under creative commons license:



This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

2008-04-28 - questions were raised on Wikipedia regarding my sources. Originally there were two, Clayton Cramer and David Kopel's 1994 paper "Shall Issue": The New Wave of Concealed Handgun Permit Laws, and the NRA-ILA's Right-to-Carry Fact Sheet

I was then contacted by Clayton Cramer personally, and he was able to provide me with a number of local court decisions that established that a number of states that the NRA had listed as having been no-issue, prior to the adoption of their shall-issue law had, in fact, been may-issue.

When I first created this image, the NRA had listed Alabama and Connecticut as shall-issue, and Iowa as may-issue. This can be verified on the Wayback Machine. In 2004, they began listing all three of these states as "fair may-issue". With respect to Alabama and Connecticut, the issue seems to be that these states have laws that can be read as being may-issue, but they are enforced as if they were shall-issue. Making them defacto shall-issue states. Iowa, on the other hand, grants discretion to the sheriffs, and while some sheriffs are fair, some are not. A few simply don't issue, period. So on this, the NRA is simply wrong.

For changes since 2001, I have simply been following the news.

2008-05-18 - Added table with online sources for shall-issue dates