If you decide you want to go to California, rent a car, and then drive around for a few weeks while on vacation, you can. There’s no law stopping you. That’s because California automatically accepts your driver’s license as valid, no matter where you’re from. The same is true in New York, Illinois, or any other state.
The same is true of your marriage license. If you move to another state, you’re still married. That state recognizes the license from a previous state.
But your concealed carry permit is a different matter entirely.
Sure, it’s recognized in some states without an issue, but that’s only because states choose who they’ll recognize and who they won’t, basically. California is notorious for not recognizing anyone’s.
Enter the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, which would mandate states to recognize other states’ permits. It shouldn’t be needed, but since some states aren’t interested in playing well with others, Congress has to act.
And they haven’t.
So we need to pick candidates who will back the act, and Iowa has at least one senatorial candidate who already has.
Jim Carlin, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate and former Iowa state senator, pledged Thursday that when elected, he will sponsor or support legislation establishing national concealed carry reciprocity, allowing law-abiding gun owners with a state-issued concealed carry permit to carry firearms across state lines without fear of conflicting state laws.
Carlin, a U.S. Army veteran and strong advocate for Second Amendment rights, highlighted his record of supporting Iowa’s 2021 Constitutional carry law, which eliminated the need for permits to carry handguns in Iowa.
Unlike incumbent Sen. Joni Ernst, who voted in favor of federal funding incentives for states to implement red-flag laws, Carlin is unapologetically supportive of the Second Amendment. According to Carlin, the red-flag laws Ernst supports undermine due process and gun owners’ rights by allowing temporary firearm seizures without a conviction.
“Red-flag laws, incentivized by federal dollars, represent a slippery slope toward eroding our Constitutional freedoms,” Carlin said. “As a state senator, I proudly voted for Iowa’s Constitutional carry law to empower citizens to protect themselves without unnecessary government barriers. In the U.S. Senate, I’ll fight for national reciprocity of concealed carry laws to ensure a citizen’s rights aren’t stripped away when they cross state lines.”
Carlin argued that the current patchwork of state laws creates absurd situations for responsible gun owners.
He argued that because, well, it does.
Moreover, Republicans who crossed the aisle on the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, like Ernst, need to be primaried and defeated. No Republican should feel so safe in the power of incumbency that they think they can get away with stuff like that.
I’d be willing to back Carlin on that fact alone. The fact that he’s come out and specifically said he’d back concealed carry reciprocity is just the icing on the cake.
As it stands, it’s difficult for armed Americans to know where their permits are good, where it’s not, what’s the latest on who can do what where, and it’s kind of a nightmare overall. There are different groups that keep lists, but a lot of people check for their destination, not every state they might stop in on the way there.
It’s a good way for good people to end up being treated as criminals, all because it’s impossible to keep up with everything all the time.
There’s a reason they say that ignorance of the law is no defense, but there really has to be a limit. People shouldn’t be expected to have law degrees and consult thousands of pages of text just to know if they’re law-abiding or not.
Concealed carry reciprocity won’t solve all of that, but it’ll make a hell of a first step, at a minimum.
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