Harrigan's Bill: Special Ops Carry Rights—All 50 States, No Excuses

Rep. Pat Harrigan (R-NC), Army combat veteran, dropped the **Special Operations Forces Concealed Carry Act**—and it does exactly what the name says. Nationwide concealed-carry rights for active-duty and honorably discharged special operators, across every branch, in every state. No permits. No gauntlets. No anti-gun governors with a veto on a warrior's right to self-defense.

**These are not ordinary citizens being asked to jump through hoops. These are the people we send behind enemy lines.**

The bill defines a "qualified special operator" by paygrade: E5–E9, W1–W5, and O1–O10. That sweeps in Army Special Forces, Delta Force, Navy SEALs, Marine Raiders, and Air Force special tactics personnel—the people doing the hardest, most dangerous work in uniform. If Washington trusts them with classified missions and lethal authority overseas, no state legislature gets to second-guess their fitness to carry a sidearm at a grocery store.

Harrigan knows the score personally. He wore the uniform. He understands that a DD-214 shouldn't be a disarmament document the moment a Special Forces soldier crosses into territory controlled by a Bloomberg-funded governor.

The legal architecture here is smart. The bill builds directly on the Law Enforcement Officers Safety Act—LEOSA—which already extends nationwide carry rights to law enforcement. **If cops get national carry, operators who've spent careers in direct-action combat deserve at minimum the same courtesy.** That's not a radical argument. That's just arithmetic.

And here's the political reality the Left can't escape: try demagoguing this one. Go ahead. Tell a Gold Star family that Delta Force operators are too dangerous to carry concealed. Explain to a Navy SEAL's wife why Illinois knows better than the Pentagon about her husband's fitness to be armed. This bill is targeted, defensible, and built to survive the culture war crossfire.

**That's exactly how pro-2A legislation should look in 2025.**

This isn't the end of the fight—it's a beachhead. National reciprocity for every law-abiding American remains the mission. But Harrigan's bill proves the argument in the sharpest possible terms: if America's most elite warfighters can't carry freely in every state, the system is broken—and everyone knows it.

Watch whether this bill gets co-sponsors fast, gets buried in committee, or gets used as a pressure point ahead of the broader national reciprocity push. The next move belongs to the rest of Congress.

**Contact your representative now. Demand a co-sponsorship and a floor vote on the Special Operations Forces Concealed Carry Act. Share this story and tag your member of Congress. Our warriors earned this—the least we can do is make noise until it passes.**