Vermont never required a carry permit, and the sky never fell

Folks, I have a story about a state that has been running an experiment for more than two centuries, and the experiment has been going so well that the people who were supposed to be alarmed by it keep having to move the goalposts. The state is Vermont. It has maple syrup, a ski industry, a famously grumpy attitude toward billboards and, since the day it joined the Union, no requirement that a law-abiding adult obtain the government's permission before carrying a handgun.

Every time another state has proposed doing the same, the prediction has been roughly the same too. Blood in the streets. Shootouts over parking spaces. The Wild West, as imagined by someone who has seen the Wild West only in a film made in the 1950s. And every time, the streets have been strangely unwilling to run red. Let me walk you through the history, because it is more interesting than the talking points, and the talking points are easier to laugh at once you know it.

What "permitless carry" means

First, define the thing, because the coverage rarely does. Permitless carry, also called constitutional carry, means that a person who is legally allowed to own a firearm may carry it, openly or concealed, without first applying for a government permit. It does not mean that anyone may carry anywhere. A person who is prohibited from possessing a firearm, such as a convicted felon, remains prohibited. The usual restrictions on sensitive places, such as courthouses, remain. A person who commits a crime with a gun faces the same prosecution as before.

What changes is the default. Under a permit system, the citizen must ask permission and wait to be told yes. Under permitless carry, the citizen may act, and the state can still punish him if he breaks the law. That is a difference in who bears the burden, and it is the difference between treating a right as a right and treating it as a privilege.

Vermont's founding text

Vermont's tradition begins with its first constitution. The Vermont Constitution of 1777, which predates statehood, contains a Declaration of Rights, and Article 16 of that chapter says: "That the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State." Look at those words, because they are older than the federal Second Amendment and in some ways plainer. The right is not tied to militia service. It is a right of "the people," and its first stated purpose is defense of themselves.

The Constitution of Vermont was drafted in the same years as Pennsylvania's, which had adopted a similar clause in 1776, and What Pennsylvania and Vermont wrote about arms before the Second Amendment tells that story in detail. When Vermont was admitted to the Union as the fourteenth state in 1791, it brought the clause with it. The state never passed a statute requiring a license to carry a handgun, and for well over a century the question never came to a head.

State v. Rosenthal, 1903

The question reached the Vermont Supreme Court in 1903, in State v. Rosenthal. The city of Rutland had adopted an ordinance that forbade carrying certain weapons, pistols among them, concealed on the person without written permission from the mayor or the chief of police. A man named Rosenthal was charged with carrying a loaded pistol concealed without that permission, and the case went up.

The court reversed the conviction. It held that the ordinance, so far as it covered carrying a pistol, was repugnant to the state constitution and state law and void. The court pointed to the unguided authority the ordinance gave the mayor or chief of police to permit or refuse carrying, and it noted that the state's own statutes restricted carrying only in narrow cases. The opinion did not decide every question about regulating carry, and I will not claim it did. But the thing it would not allow was a city making a constitutional right depend on an official's permission.

I would invite you to notice the date. That is 1903, a hundred and nineteen years before the Supreme Court decided Bruen and told New York that it could not condition a carry license on a showing of "proper cause" to an official's satisfaction. Vermont's court had struck down a discretionary permit scheme in the age of the horseless carriage. Sometimes the future is simply the past that nobody listened to.

Alaska, 2003

For most of the twentieth century Vermont was an oddity, and no other state followed. Then came Alaska. In 2003, the Alaska legislature passed, and the governor signed, a law allowing residents who could lawfully possess a handgun to carry it concealed without a permit. Alaska is a vast and sparsely policed state where a rural resident may live a long way from the nearest trooper.

Here the opponents' predictions were typical. In legislative debates, critics of bills like this routinely argue that removing the permit requirement will lead to more shootings, endanger police officers and make it harder to stop dangerous people. Those predictions can be tested, and the test is the experience that follows.

Arizona, 2010

In 2010, Arizona became the third state, and the first with a large urban population, to adopt permitless carry. Governor Jan Brewer signed the bill in April of that year. Arizonans who could lawfully possess a handgun could carry it concealed without a permit.

Arizona is not Vermont. It has big cities, a long border, a diverse population and a history of crime problems the quiet hills of Vermont do not share. If permitless carry were going to cause chaos, Phoenix was the place to expect it. The predictions of chaos were made, again, in the legislative debates. I will not recite Arizona's crime figures here, because crime rates move for many reasons and nobody can say that one law caused a pattern; check the state's own statistics. That is the point. The sky-is-falling claim was a causal claim, and it needed the sky to fall.

The spread

After Arizona came others. Wyoming adopted a form of permitless carry in 2011. Kansas and Maine followed in 2015, other states did through the rest of the 2010s, and Texas, the second most populous state, adopted it in 2021. By the mid-2020s, permitless carry applied in about half the states or more, depending on how one counts. The details differ: some states cover only residents, some cover only adults over 21, some keep a voluntary permit for reciprocity. But the principle is the same, and the trend is not a fringe movement. It is a position held by roughly half the states.

Here is the part the coverage leaves out. If every one of these states had seen a catastrophe, we would know. The news cycle does not miss a catastrophe. Instead, each state's debate follows the same pattern: the prediction is made, the law passes, the headlines about the prediction fade, and the year-over-year story becomes a story about something else.

The numbered argument

Now let me make the case plainly, as a sequence, because the host who only tells stories is leaving his audience with a mood and no argument.

1. A right need not be requested. The First Amendment does not require a permit to speak or to worship, and the Second Amendment's text says the right "shall not be infringed." Vermont's own Article 16 is blunter still. A government that requires you to ask permission to exercise a right is treating the right as a gift.

1. Criminals do not apply for permits. A permit system filters the law-abiding. The person who intends to commit a robbery is not going to be deterred by the fact that carrying a gun is a misdemeanor without a license, and he is not going to stand in line at the sheriff's office. The burden falls on the single mother who works nights and cannot take a day off for fingerprints.

1. Prohibited persons stay prohibited. The federal ban on possession by felons, fugitives, unlawful drug users and others applies in every state, whether or not the state requires a permit. Permitless carry changes who must ask, not who is barred.

1. The experience supports caution about predictions. Vermont has had the policy for its entire history. That does not prove cause, and Vermont differs from other places in ways that matter, such as its small, rural population. But a person who says the policy is inherently dangerous should have to explain why a state that has lived under it for so long has not shown the danger.

1. When the claim is testable, the burden is on the claimant. A person who says that a law will cause bloodshed should be willing to name what he expects to see, and to concede if it does not appear.

The strongest objection

The best objection to all this is not that permit systems are good in the abstract, but that they perform a real screening function. A permit requires a background check at the time of application, and in many states a training course, and a person who has failed to meet those standards will not receive the permit. Remove the permit, the argument goes, and you remove a second line of defense beyond the check at the point of sale. Police, the objectors add, find it useful to have a lawful reason to disarm someone they suspect is dangerous. These points are made in good faith, and by serious people.

Here is my answer. A permit screens only those who apply, and the dangerous person does not. The point-of-sale check applies to every purchase from a licensed dealer, and the federal prohibitions apply to everyone, with or without a permit. The remaining gap, which is the private sale between two non-prohibited residents, is a separate question that nine myths about gun shows, private sales and the loophole that is not one addresses. As for training, I am a fan of it, and I want people to take it. I am not a fan of making it a condition of a constitutional right, any more than I would make a person pass a writing course before publishing a pamphlet. Many permitless-carry states keep an optional permit, and many gun owners seek training because they want to. Voluntary training is a virtue, and mandatory training is a tax.

The objectors are right about one thing, and I should say it: Vermont is not a controlled experiment. A state with a small population and low crime to begin with does not prove that the same policy will produce the same results in a large city. I accept that. What I do not accept is the reverse, that the absence of proof for safety is proof of danger. If the claim is that the policy is dangerous, the evidence should show it, and across the states that have adopted it, the grand predictions have not been vindicated.

What Vermont did next, and why it matters

An honest history has to include what happened later. In April 2018, after a foiled plot to attack a high school in Fair Haven, the state legislature passed, and Governor Phil Scott signed, a package of gun measures. It included universal background checks, a minimum age of 21 for purchasing firearms with exceptions, limits on magazine capacity of 10 rounds for long guns and 15 for handguns, and a ban on bump stocks. Many Vermont gun owners were angry, and many conservatives were unhappy that a governor of their own party signed it.

Note what did not change. Vermont did not adopt a permit requirement for carrying. The state that added purchase and magazine rules still treats carrying as a right. The lesson is that permitless carry and other gun policies can be debated separately. A state can regulate sales and still decline to license the exercise of a right, and many people on the other side of the debate do not seem to realize those are different questions.

The Founding anchor

A constitutionalist would want the text, so here it is. The Second Amendment: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." The word "infringed" is the one that matters. To infringe a right is to encroach on it, and a requirement to obtain advance permission is a textbook encroachment. In Bruen the Supreme Court held that the amendment protects carrying a handgun in public for self-defense, and that a licensing scheme that gives officials discretion to deny the license to ordinary law-abiding citizens cannot be sustained.

That does not mean every licensing scheme is invalid. The Court said that "shall-issue" regimes, which grant a permit to anyone who meets objective criteria, are not necessarily unconstitutional, though it noted concerns about abuses such as long delays and exorbitant fees. But the logic of the case moves in one direction: toward treating carry as a right and not a privilege.

Vermont got there first, in 1777 and again in 1903. The rest of the country is catching up, one legislature at a time, and the sky, I am pleased to report, remains where it was.

For more on how the states treat the right, see why your state constitution may guard gun rights better than the federal one and Bliss, Nunn and the antebellum judges who first read the right to bear arms, which covers the early state courts that read the right the way Vermont's did. For the practical side, how to testify at your statehouse when a gun bill comes up for a hearing shows how to speak up in your own legislature, and Federalism Lets Fifty States Experiment, and the Constitution Planned It explains why fifty states experimenting is the system working. Read the clause for yourself at the Constitution page.

The case in brief

1. Vermont's 1777 Declaration of Rights protects a right of the people "to bear arms for the defence of themselves and the State," and the state has never required a carry permit.
2. State v. Rosenthal (1903) struck down a city ordinance that made carrying depend on officials' permission, because a right cannot be a matter of official discretion.
3. Alaska (2003), Arizona (2010) and many states since have adopted permitless carry, and the claim that it must cause bloodshed should be tested against each state's own data.
4. Permitless carry leaves prohibited persons prohibited and sensitive places off limits, and a state can still regulate sales, as Vermont did in 2018.
5. Vermont is not a controlled experiment, but the burden is on those who predict harm to show it, and the record to date has not.

What you can do: read your own state's carry law on your legislature's website, find out whether it requires a permit, and if you have an opinion, write one short letter to your state representative this week.