I didn’t know they did that

But apparently, Utah will stop issuing CCW permits to non-residents of the US.

A legislative committee learned Tuesday that about 1,000 citizens of foreign countries have earned Utah’s wallet identification card signifying they can pack a gun out of sight in Utah and any of 30 U.S. states that have a reciprocity agreement with Utah. 

The fact that they were issuing CCW permits to foreign nationals itself isn’t really a problem to me; however their new policy appears to effectively cut off the permit process for non-resident foreigners.  The emergency ruling effectively ends it; however they may place additional rules to allow for Canadian citizens.

The reason they started denying the permits is that someone realized that other countries weren’t sharing criminal records with Utah, so when the State Police would run a background check, it would come back with “no record”.  Now that’s not true for Canadian citizens, because the US and Canada share criminal records.

Approximately 1,000 permits were issued, and of those about half went to Canadian citizens.  Personally, I hope that Utah makes rule changes so that they will continue allowing permits to foreign nationals, but only if those people are from a country willing to share crime database information with Utah.  If you want to play the game, you’ve got to play by the rules.