*Shall-issue means that state authorities MUST give permits to all law-abiding citizens who pass the application procedure required by state law.
**May-issue means that state authorities may deny concealed carry permits to anyone for any reason.

"The conference attendees were primarily members of the professions of law, medicine, and public health. The unifying theme of the conference was the movement to view 'gun violence' as a public health issue, and to address it through the application of traditional public health mechanisms. This approach is no accident. The public health approach has 3 advantages for anti-gunners: First and foremost, it cloaks civilian disarmament initiatives in a new mantle of respectability. Well-meaning but misinformed medical professionals, concerned mainly with preventing injury, lend their reputations and professional status to the misguided, ineffective, and destructive ends of the anti-gunners. Secondly, the medical and public health establishments wield a substantial amount of political power. The third and most important advantage of this approach for disarmament activists is that it shifts the terms of debate from a philosophical and political issue based on individual rights into a series of technical cost-benefit analyses based on medical and public health considerations."

"...a prejudice against gun ownership pervades the public health field. Deborah Prothrow-Stith, dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, nicely summarizes the typical attitude of her colleagues in a recent book..."I hate guns and cannot imagine why anybody would want to own one. If I had my way, guns for sport would be registered, and all other guns would be banned." Opposition to gun ownership is also the official position of the U.S. Public Health Service, the CDC's parent agency. Since 1979, its goal has been 'to reduce the number of handguns in private ownership,' starting with a 25% reduction by the turn of the century. ... If treating gun violence as a public health issue invites confusion and controversy, why is this approach so popular? The main function of the disease metaphor is to lend a patina of scientific credibility to the belief that guns cause violence -- a belief that is hard to justify on empirical grounds. ... What they are actually trying to do is disguise politics as science."

"Even their claim of an "epidemic of violence" is fake. That claim, like so many other of their claims, has been so often dogmatically repeated that few think to question the claim by checking the FBI and other data. Homicide rates have been stable to slightly declining for decades except for inner city teens and young adults involved with illicit drug trafficking. We have noticed that, if one subtracts the inner city contribution to violence, American homicide rates are lower than in Britain and the other paragons of gun control."

"In the early 1990s, Congress took $2.6 million away from the CDC. In budgetary terms, it was a pittance: 0.1% of the CDC's $2.2 billion allocation. Symbolically, however, it was important: $2.6 million was the amount CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC) (cdc.gov/ncipc) had spent in 1995 on studies of firearm injuries. Congressional critics, who charged that the center's research program was driven by an anti-gun prejudice, had previously sought to eliminate the NCIPC completely. 'This research is designed to, and is used to, promote a campaign to reduce lawful firearms ownership in America,' wrote 10 senators, including then Majority Leader Bob Dole and current Majority Leader Trent Lott. 'Funding redundant research initiatives, particularly those which are driven by a social-policy agenda, simply does not make sense.' For your own edification, for decades pro-2A groups were complaining about the bias and fake studies that were done by the CDC (paid by our tax dollars) and many other medical groups throughout the U.S.

"After the NCIPC survived the 1995 budget process, opponents narrowed their focus, seeking to pull the plug on the gun research specifically, or at least to punish the CDC for continuing to fund it. At a May 1996 hearing, Rep. Jay Dickey (R-AR), co-sponsor of the amendment cutting the CDC's budget, chastised NCIPC Director Mark Rosenberg for treating guns as a 'public health menace,' suggesting that he was 'working toward changing society's attitudes so that it becomes socially unacceptable to own handguns.' In June, the House Appropriations Committee adopted Dickey's amendment, which included a prohibition on the use of CDC funds 'to advocate or promote gun control,' and in July the full House rejected an attempt to restore the money."

"Behind the faulty research and the dissemination of this biased information lies a sinister objective. This objective was discussed by respected criminologist Don B. Kates in a 1995 Tennessee Law Review (law.utk.edu) article entitled "Guns and Public Health." After examining the activities of NCIPC and its allies, Kates concluded: "Based on studies, and propelled by leadership from the CDC, the objective [of defining guns as a public health risk] has broadened so that it now includes banning and confiscation of all handguns, restrictive licensing of owners of other firearms and eventual elimination of all firearms from American life, excepting (perhaps) only a small elite of extremely wealthy collectors, hunters or target shooters. ... In this connection, the term 'gun control' needs some clarification. That term could mean no more than non-controversial measures to prohibit gun misuse or gun possession by high risk groups. In the literature we are analyzing, however, "guns are not ... inanimate objects, but in fact are a social ill," and controlling them implies wholesale confiscation from the general public so as to radically reduce gun availability to ordinary people."