Getting a concealed carry permit in Texas

Ralph Blumenthal, NY Times:

THE snap-snap-snap of small-arms fire was echoing around the Hot Wells Shooting Range in Cypress, Tex., as Jim Pruett set up a wall of humanoid targets against an earthen berm.

“Is the line ready?” shouted Mr. Pruett, an affable guns and ammo dealer, pausing to marvel at the golden glow from the dust of expended brass cartridges ashimmer in the setting sun. “Anyone forget which end the bullet comes out?”

Moments later we were blasting away, trying to put down an imaginary assailant just three yards from us.

It was the final exercise in a daylong course for a coveted Texas certification — the license to carry a concealed handgun. “In Texas, we don’t carry guns because we have to,” Mr. Pruett told me later. “We carry them because we get to.”

There’s no telling how many Texans actually walk around armed, but by Department of Public Safety figures, 247,345 men and women, more than 1 percent of the population, may legally carry a handgun provided it is truly concealed and not out in mischievous view.

A majority of states — 36, including Texas — require the authorities to issue a concealed-handgun license to anyone who meets certification and is not ineligible, like felons. Two others, Vermont and Alaska, do not require a license to carry a concealed weapon. Ten states, including New York, are “may issue” states, where applicants must demonstrate a special need. Two — Wisconsin and Illinois — prohibit concealed weapons altogether. Local laws also vary.

Nationwide, for better or worse, Americans own some 220 million guns, and half the households in the country are believed to be armed.

“You’re not going to be the victims of chaos,” Mr. Pruett had earlier promised the class of 50 — a cross-section of Texas society who gathered over coffee, doughnuts and the filled Czech pastries called kolaches not long after sunup on a Sunday in a makeshift classroom in a strip mall near his gun shop in the northwest Houston suburbs. “You’re going to be the solution to chaos.”

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It is an interesting story where the reporter actually learns hand gun safety and how to act responsibly when carrying a weapon. What the story does not address is how the threat of people carrying weapons has actually reduced crime. But, for a NY Times story, it is pretty fair on the reality of the concealed carry program.