It is time for a new method of grading states based on their concealed-carry regimes.

Gun Facts has created one, and the findings are stark.

Why Is A New System Needed?

The old system classified states by the generality of how concealed-carry permits (CCWs) were provided. The major classifications were:

• No Carry: Carrying firearms in public was not allowed.
• May Issue: The government, largely local, had discretion on if and to whom a permit would be issued.
• Shall Issue: Providing a person was not prohibited (i.e., prior felony conviction) the government would issue a permit.
• Permitless: No permit was required providing you were not a prohibited person.

However, this system was in and of itself inadequate, and the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Bruen case changed much. The weaknesses of the old classification system were manifold:

• The Bruen case resulted in several May Issue states being forced to become Shall Issue. But they legislated sundry laws that made obtaining a permit expensive and difficult, and highly restricted where one might carry.
• Even in other Shall Issue states, there were barriers. For example, North Carolina requires eight hours of training and demonstrated live fire proficiency.
• The cost of obtaining a permit, both in government fees and training, could be prohibitive.
• Some states issued permits quickly while others took many months.
• Some states allowed local governments (counties and cities) to modify carry regulations, making the legal risk of carrying unpredictable.
• Some states required prerequisites to be met, such as mental health background checks.

Hence, the old no/may/shall/permitless system was often inaccurate. Gun Facts has fixed that.

The Gun Facts CCW Scorecard Methodology

Gun Facts has identified seven major topics that affected the ability to be allowed to carry in public or the flexibility of carrying. These topic areas are:

• SENSITIVE PLACES: These are locations where the law disallows a person to carry a firearm. The more sensitive places, the less flexibility a person has to carry, and the higher the risk of being charged with a “firearm crime” (e.g., forgetting that guns are not allowed in hospitals while rushing in to see your injured child in the ER).
• TRAINING: The number of hours of formal training required before a permit can be issued.
• PREREQUISITES: Having to prove in advance certain factors such as mental health validation, having “good moral character,” providing personal references, or having a “good cause” to carry.
• PREMTION: The state preempts local governments from modifying carry laws.
• TIME TO ISSE: The legislated maximum amount of time in which a permit must be issued.
• COST: The total cost, including government fees and training, to receive a permit.

Though this sounds straightforward, there are some things worth noting where Gun Facts adapted to reality:

• SCHOOLS: Federal law currently disallows guns on K12 campuses, which applies to all states. So, we did not include schools in the list of sensitive places.
• COSTS: We combined the government fees and the average cost in a state for training (if required) and scored that as the number of hours at the average wage in each state to cover the costs (i.e., how long does the Average Joe have to labor to afford a permit).
• SENSITIVE PLACES: This was tricky as there are huge variations in how any given sensitive place is governed. For example, in many states you can carry in a bar if you are not drinking but in others you cannot under any circumstances. Thus, we had to crudely classify carry in sensitive locations as allowed, disallowed, or conditional.
• PREMPTION: We had to classify as well for state law preempting local law concerning carry regulations. Most states cleanly preempt or do not preempt local laws concerning carry, but others preempt some things and not others. These were scored yes, no or partial.

How The States Score On CCW Permitting

The total scores quite conveniently fell into a range of 3–47, where the higher the score the more restrictive the regime.

No state, not even permitless states, scored zero. This is primarily because even permitless states have sensitive-place provisions. For example, Alaska tied for the low score, but prohibits carrying firearms in government buildings and courthouses, and private property without consent, as well as airports and terminals.

What About Comparing to Crime?

The laws gathered were in force as of June of 2025. The most recent CDC firearm death data is for 2023. That is enough time for laws to have changed significantly. For example, four states went permitless between January of 2023 and June of 2025.

Because of this time lag, comparing gun homicide rates against the scorecard might be misleading. Two years from now, when gun death data for 2025 is available, it would be accurate.

But… what the hell. Here is a brief analysis removing the states that changed their regimes between 2023 and 2025 (Florida, Nebraska, Louisiana and South Carolina). We’ll also note that six states had gun homicide rates so low that the CDC labeled their own estimated rate as “unreliable.”

The correlation measure, R², for the 2025 scorecard and 2023 gun homicide rates, excluding states that transitioned to new legislative regimes in that period, is 0.01, which means there is no correlation between the state public carry laws and gun homicide rates.

I wish we could say we were surprised.

Details on Scoring

Since someone will ask, here are the details on how we scored each topic area.

OVERALL: We attempted to get a 0–10 score on each topic. The only one that was problematic was the “time to issue,” the legislatively mandated number of days in which a permit had to be granted. Permitless states have zero days, and New York has 180 days. That is a wide swath to normalize.

SENSITIVE AREAS: There were nine sensitive location types. For “disallowed” locations, we multiplied the count of disallowed location by 1 and multiplied “conditional” locations as 0.5. “Allowed” locations defaulted to zero.

TRAINING: Training hours went from zero to 16, depending on the state. We normalized each state’s score on a 0–10 scale.

PREREQUISITES: There were four types of prerequisites, so we counted how many in each state were mandated and multiplied by 2.25 to push them into a 0–10 scale.

PREMPTION: Full state-level preemption scored zero (no local barriers to use), partial as five and full “local prerogatives” as 10.

TIME TO ISSUE: We divided a state’s legislated maximum number of days by the largest figure of all the states, then multiplied by 10.

FEES: For each state, we added together the fees charged by the government and the average cost of training (if training was required). We then divided that total cost by the state’s average hourly wage to determine the number of hours a person would have to work to pay for a permit. Quite happily, the maximum of all the states was 10 hours of labor, so it fit our 0–10 scaling scheme nicely.