In the 2024 election, pro-gun advocates coalesced around a primary request for President Donald Trump’s second administration: a dramatic loosening of concealed carry regulations nationwide, something that Republican leaders in both the House and the Senate have been vocal advocates of in the past.

National concealed carry reciprocity has become the main policy request from pro-gun advocates and the gun lobby in Trump’s second term. The policy would require states to recognize the concealed carry permits from other states, allowing permit holders from states with looser regulations to carry weapons in states with stricter regulations.

“I will protect the right of self-defense wherever it is under siege. I will sign concealed carry reciprocity. Your Second Amendment does not end at the state line,” Trump said in a campaign video last year.

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The policy, as proposed by Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C., would make concealed carry permits akin to driver's licenses in that a permit from one state would be valid in any other. For residents of permitless carry states, like Texas, all a gun owner would have to do is show that they are a resident of a permitless carry state.

While this policy has been proposed perennially going back years, gun lobbyists see the current Congress as their opening to push the policy through the Republican Congress and onto the president’s desk. Both Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La.., and the Senate majority leader, Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., have been vocal advocates for the policy in their time in Congress, with Thune introducing the bill in the Senate during Trump’s first term and Johnson advocating for the policy on the floor of the House in 2017. 

“Our constitutional right to keep and bear arms should not be confined by state lines,” Johnson said in 2017. “It’s critically important to me that the fundamental right of every law-abiding citizen to keep and bear arms is protected. And yes, this legislation is about preserving our God-given freedoms.”

In the 119th Congress, Johnson has promised to bring the bill, which passed in the House Judiciary Committee in January, to a floor vote, where the bill has passed in previous Republican pushes for the policy. The bill has 182 co-sponsors, including one Democrat, Rep. Jared Golden, D-Maine, who........

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