VERMONT WAS DOING IT BEFORE IT WAS COOL: A HIPSTER HISTORY OF PERMITLESS CARRY
Before open-carry TikTok fashion clips showed stylish ways to brandish, Vermont quietly let folks holster whatever, whenever, without a permission slip.
Vermont lived by the “carry-anything-anywhere” motto solo for decades, but in the last 10 years, a whopping 22 states have stolen their steez.
The United States Concealed Carry Association (USSCA) lists the permitless carry states as follows: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
For the purposes of the regional analysis, I will be looking only at “fully unrestricted,” or “no-restriction” constitutional carry states with zero added hoops. That means no extra permits, no extra training required, no preference on the type of carry (open or concealed), and no limitations on firearm type. That nixes:
Florida & North Dakota – still conceal-only (extra hoops to have your gun as a showpiece).
Tennessee – handguns only (you will fail the vibe check carrying long guns).
This leaves our final 26 contestants as: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming. Minor age quirks, such as needing to be 21 instead of 18 to carry certain weapons, won’t kick a state off this island.
With our final contestants assembled and standing shoulder to shoulder - obviously not too close because they’re all packing, we can continue on to the data. First, we’ll utilize the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer tool, setting the time frame to 10 years and going through state by state to create a comparison of those sweet sweet gory numbers. From there we’ll be able to see just how popular firearms were as the weapon of choice for the homicides in these states. Will similar laws mean similar rates across the board, or will states in same sections of the country have similar pew-pew levels?
For the second part of this analysis, we’ll take a slice of states that jumped on the bandwagon approximately halfway between 2009 - 2019 (don’t get mad at me, the time-series data we need for this part only goes up to 2019 from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting database, at the time of this writing) to see if their gun homicide rates increased or decreased after joining the fully permitless club.
While these ‘mini-analyses’ won’t tell us everything, they should give a decent snapshot into how permitless carry holds up across different states.
THE METHOD (Part 1)
Using ten years of FBI Crime Data Explorer figures and a brutal amount of spreadsheet gymnastics, I compared homicide weapon choice in all 26 fully unrestricted states with the national baseline.
This part took a while, but it wasn’t all that hard. Set the selected crime to ‘Homicide,’ then set the location to ‘United States,’ and lastly, set the time frame to ‘10 Years.’ Then, scroll down to where it says ‘Type Of Weapon Involved By Offense’ and click on ‘Show More.’ From here, simply tally up all the weapon types that would be considered a gun or firearm and put that over the total homicides. The average layperson would consider all of these a gun or firearm: Handgun, Firearm (likely cases where the specific type wasn't identified), Rifle, Other Firearm, Handgun (Automatic), Shotgun, Firearm (Automatic), Rifle (Automatic), Other Firearm (Automatic), and Shotgun (Automatic).
Screenshot of Crime Data Explorer tool - Federal Bureau of Investigation, retrieved August, 2025.
Clicking the ‘Download’ button will put this info into a .CSV file that can be opened with Excel and now that we have the benchmark for the country as a whole, just repeat this step for our 26 contestant states, copy and pasting, until you have all the data on a single sheet.
What’s that? You don’t feel like it? 🙄
Okay, fine, here’s an Excel file that conveniently has all of this done for you… you’re welcome.
But does making removing red tape around having a gun on you actually make things more dangerous? Or is the best way to neutralize gun violence a collective call to arms?