Jeffrey Johnson drives a truck for a living. He holds valid concealed carry permits from Florida and Georgia, and he carries a handgun on the road because long-haul trucking is not a low-risk occupation. But every time his rig crosses into Minnesota, the law requires him to unload that handgun and lock it in a container, because Minnesota does not recognize a permit from either state. Johnson has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to explain why a right he holds in Tallahassee and Atlanta evaporates somewhere around Fargo. The justices will discuss whether to hear Johnson v. Jacobson at their September 28 conference, and the outcome matters far beyond one trucker's glove compartment.
I spent time in the Marine Corps long before I built a career in institutional investing, and my brother served in Army Special Forces. My son is a West Point graduate and an Army aviator. I did not come to the Second Amendment through a law review article. I came to it through a family that has spent three generations training with firearms and depending on the judgment of the people who carry them. That background tells me something the current patchwork of state permit laws does not reflect: a right that depends on your zip code is not a right. It is a courtesy, revocable by the next legislature.
The Supreme Court settled the core question four years ago. In New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court held that the Second Amendment protects an ordinary, law-abiding citizen's right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense, and it struck down New York's discretionary "proper cause" licensing scheme as unconstitutional. The Court did leave room for objective, shall-issue permitting: background checks, training requirements, and similar criteria designed to confirm that an applicant is law-abiding and responsible. What Bruen did not settle is whether one state has to respect a permit that another state already verified.
That gap is not trivial. Minnesota currently recognizes permits from roughly three dozen states and refuses at least 15 others, Florida and Georgia among them. A permit holder does not know this until he looks it up, and the penalty for guessing wrong is a felony weapons charge, not a warning ticket. Compare that to how we treat almost every other credential in American life. A Texas driver's license works in California. A Florida bar admission gets reciprocity consideration in a dozen other states. Even a state-issued fishing license usually travels better than a concealed carry permit does, and nobody's life has ever depended on a fishing license.
The Second Amendment is not a state-by-state courtesy. It is an enumerated right, and enumerated rights do not fluctuate at the border. Nobody argues that your right to free speech gets weaker in Illinois than it is in Texas, or that your protection against unreasonable search evaporates once you cross the Mississippi River. States regulate the manner of carry all the time, including where a firearm can go and what training a permit requires. That is a legitimate exercise of state authority. What is not legitimate is a state deciding that a citizen who has already proven himself law-abiding to one sovereign has to prove it all over again to the next one, on pain of prosecution, simply because he changed lanes on I-35.
Some of my friends on the federalism side will tell me that states have always set their own firearms rules and that national reciprocity tramples on that tradition. I take federalism seriously, and I would remind them that federalism was never supposed to mean fifty different answers to whether a constitutional right applies to you. States retain real authority over training standards, place restrictions, and the issuance process itself. What they should not retain is a veto over whether a citizen's underlying right exists once he leaves home. Twenty-four state attorneys general made exactly this case to Congress in May 2025, and that is not a fringe position. It is a coalition of nearly half the states saying the current system does not work.
Congress does not need to wait on nine justices to fix this. The Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, H.R. 38, cleared the House Judiciary Committee eighteen to nine back in March 2025 and has sat on the Union Calendar since October, waiting on a floor vote that leadership has never scheduled. Its Senate companion, S. 65, has more than forty cosponsors and has gone nowhere in the Judiciary Committee. Both bills would do the same simple thing: treat a valid concealed carry permit, or a state's constitutional carry status, the way we already treat a driver's license, honored everywhere, while leaving each state free to set its own rules for where and how a firearm is carried within its borders.
The Supreme Court may or may not take up Johnson's case this fall, and if it does, a ruling is a year or more away. Congress can act this year. A trucker should not need a law degree, a favorable Eighth Circuit panel, and a coin flip at the Supreme Court's long conference just to keep the same self-defense right in Minnesota that he already lawfully exercises in Georgia. Call your senators and ask where S. 65 stands in committee. A right this basic should not depend on which side of a state line you happen to be standing on when you need it.
Jay Rogers is a financial professional with more than 30 years of experience in private equity, private credit, hedge funds, and wealth management. He has a BS from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, UPENN, and Harvard. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.