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Does New Mexico Accept Online Concealed Carry Classes?

By on October 18, 2018 in New Mexico Law, Training

UPDATE: The below article was written prior to Jan 1st, 2021 and at the time it was written one could take an online class and apply for a Virginia non-resident permit. That is NO LONGER TRUE. This article is outdated and the reader should note that Virginia no longer accepts online training. The main takeaway? In New Mexico you need to take an in-person class to qualify for the permit and there is no longer any loophole to get around that.

 

There has been an influx of companies that have appeared on the internet offering online video only concealed carry classes. In addition to our own in-person training network and online store, we also offer an online concealed carry course.

If you have been researching trying to understand the implications for New Mexico and online concealed carry training, this article will serve as a guide to navigating all the state specific laws and will help clarify what you need to know.

The first thing to be clear on is that ONLY Virginia will issue a permit to any person in the country, who has taken an online only concealed carry class, and mails paperwork in remotely. None of the other 49 states will do that. Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that there are no implications for New Mexico as we will clarify below.

The Online concealed carry classes have become popular nationwide because the Virginia Non-Resident permit is valid in 29 states of the country. So, while an online only class only qualifies a person to get a Virginia permit, that Virginia permit is still valuable in 28 states other than Virginia.

Now, the map below represents the states that honor the Virginia Non-Resident permit and while New Mexico is green this can be deceiving. At first you might assume that because New Mexico honors the Virginia Non-Resident permit that you could obtain that permit instead of our New Mexico permit but you, in fact, cannot.
This is because New Mexico requires that residents of our state MUST obtain a New Mexico permit in order to carry concealed here. So, if you were hoping you could take an online concealed carry class and forego taking a local in-person class to get the New Mexico permit I’m afraid that won’t work. Because you live in New Mexico you need to obtain the local permit.

Now regardless of all that, it is also worth noting that independent of the Virginia Non-Resident permit being an option for the local carrying of a concealed firearm or not, a lot of people choose to obtain it in addition to a local permit since it can also expand the number of states where you can legally carry.
Specific to New Mexico if you have our local permit and also choose to take an online concealed carry class and obtain a Virginia Concealed Carry permit then you would add Georgia with incremental reciprocity to the list of states where you can now carry. This is all states that do not honor the New Mexico permit but do honor the Virginia Non-Resident Permit.

So if you are interested in expanding your reciprocity via the Virginia Non-Resident permit to include Georgia you can learn more about our Online Concealed Carry Class here.

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