I’ve spent 30 years advising clients on risk they can quantify: interest rate risk, market risk, counterparty risk. None of that prepared me for the specific anxiety a friend described to me last month, driving his late father’s shotgun from Oregon to a memorial service in Pennsylvania. The gun was unloaded. It was locked in a hard case. The ammunition rode in a separate box in the trunk. He still mapped his route around three states like a man running contraband, because he couldn’t be certain the law would agree with him if a state trooper didn’t.
He wasn’t running contraband. He was trying to comply with a federal statute that has told Americans for 40 years that this exact trip is legal, yet still leaves them guessing at the details.
Congress passed that statute, 18 U.S.C. § 926A, as part of the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986. The text is simple enough: if you can lawfully possess a firearm where your trip starts and ends, you may pass through anywhere in between, provided the firearm is unloaded and locked away from the passenger compartment. Straightforward, until you need gas, a hotel room, or a rest stop — none of which the statute mentions.
That gap isn’t academic. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives proposed a rule in May clarifying that ordinary travel activity, fuel, food, an overnight stay, or a breakdown still count as protected transportation rather than a fresh violation of whatever state you happen to be sitting in at 11 p.m. It’s the kind of clarification that shouldn’t require a federal rulemaking docket, since Congress already told us what the law protects. It never quite told us what a trip is.
Four senators don’t want that question answered. Sens. Dick Durbin (D-IL), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) wrote ATF Director Robert Cekada on Aug. 4, arguing the agency had overreached by extending protection to overnight stops and to routine gear such as slings and optics. Read past the public safety language, and their real objection is to certainty itself. A hunter who can’t say for sure whether his rifle scope travels under federal protection is a hunter who thinks twice about the trip. For some of the letter’s signers, that hesitation is the entire point.
To be fair, there’s a narrow textualist case for their position. The statute says “transporting,” not “transporting, plus whatever stops the agency later decides are reasonable.” Read it literally, though, and you’ve made it a legal gamble to buy a sandwich while your unloaded rifle sits locked in the trunk, which isn’t federalism. It’s a trap built out of ambiguity, and it catches the law-abiding far more often than the criminal, who was never counting on § 926A in the first place.
This is where a national reciprocity law does something the ATF rule can’t. H.R. 38, the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, would let a permit holder who can lawfully carry in his home state carry in any state that permits their own residents to do the same. It wouldn’t touch § 926A’s transport rule, and it wouldn’t override a private landowner’s property or a state government building. What it would do is stop treating a law-abiding citizen as a suspect who has to relitigate his rights at every state line.
JAY ROGERS: A GUN SAT IN A LIVING ROOM. THE FEDS CALLED IT ‘INTERSTATE COMMERCE’
I don’t need a hypothetical to make this case. My professional life runs through people who own firearms as tools rather than symbols, and my family runs through people who carried rifles for the government before they ever owned one for themselves. None of them is asking for a loophole. They’re asking Congress to say plainly what it implied in 1986: a law-abiding citizen doesn’t forfeit his rights because he crossed a state line.
H.R. 38 has been sitting in front of Congress, in one form or another, since 2017. It clears the House Judiciary Committee with some regularity and dies everywhere past it. The senators who wrote ATF this month have made their preference plain. They’d rather govern through ambiguity than legislate through clarity. Pass reciprocity, and the trunk of your car stops being a legal gray area. Until Congress acts, keep the case locked, keep the ammunition separate, and keep your receipts. You’re going to need them.
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 Bachelor of Science in criminal justice from Northeastern University and has completed postgraduate studies at UCLA, the University of Pennsylvania, and Harvard University. He writes about issues in finance, constitutional law, national security, human nature, and public policy.