National Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act: I’m Just Not That Excited
Jon Stokes 03.01.17
The senate version of the hotly anticipated National Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act has yet to be officially published, but you can now check out a PDF of it, here.
I have to say, I’m not really as excited about national reciprocity as I’m apparently supposed to be. At SHOT, everyone one the floor seemed more excited by the Hearing Protection Act than this reciprocity thing, but I can see why the gun industry is pushing reciprocity first: the market for suppressors will always be vastly smaller, in terms of dollars, than the market for carry guns.
Suppressors are just dead simple baffle stacks that any monkey can make in a garage, and once they’re legalized every monkey with a garage will make one. This is likely to drive prices way down to the point where the total addressable market remains small in dollar terms. Not so with carry guns, however.
Carry guns are what has basically saved the gun industry, with the decline of hunting. The majority of gun buyers now are self-defense buyers, and that number continues to go up. So the commercial logic behind the NRA pushing this makes sense to me because this might expand the market for carry guns even further.
What doesn’t make sense to me is why anyone would carry outside the state where they’re licensed. Concealed carry laws vary by state, and many states have some arcane rules on who can carry what, where, and when. I have no interest in having a trip ruined because I carried within 100 yards of a church that has a daycare on the third Wednesday of the month after the most recent full moon, or whatever the rule is.
But maybe I’m overthinking it. Convince me that I’m wrong and that when this act passes I can use my Texas carry license with confidence on my visits to San Francisco.
