What Is "Public Carry"?

When people talk about “gun control” today, it is sometimes unclear what kind of laws they are specifically referring to. Our state and national governments have many rules about who may purchase a firearm, who may purchase a handgun, where a firearm can be carried, where ammunition can be sold, and what kinds of firearm accessories (like silencers) Americans are allowed to own. In the past, there were yet more and different laws about where and how gunpowder needed to be stored, where militia weapons could be kept, and which classes of people were mandated to own (or prohibited from owning) firearms. All of these types of laws fall under the umbrella of “gun control” laws. 

To clarify which types of laws they are referring to, scholars and policy experts who write about gun laws today have created some useful labels. One of these is the phrase “public carry,” which applies to any law that regulates where a firearm or weapon is allowed to be carried in public. In most states, public carry laws have historically tended to specify that weapons could not be carried concealed in public; though technically open carry was not prohibited by the statutes in question, it was nonetheless uncommon for town-dwelling people to do it. Texas is a little special here, because it was one of only a handful of states to enact public carry laws that prohibited both open and concealed carry of certain “deadly weapons.”