Gun rights commentator Colion Noir says West Virginia just forced a question back into the open that a lot of lawmakers would rather dodge: if an 18-year-old is considered an adult for almost every major civic responsibility, why does that same adult suddenly become “too young” when the subject turns to concealed carry?
In Noir’s view, that contradiction sits at the center of West Virginia House Bill 4106, which was signed by Governor Patrick Morrisey on April 1. The new law expands constitutional carry to include adults ages 18, 19, and 20, allowing them to carry a concealed handgun without a permit if they are otherwise legally allowed to possess a firearm.
As Colion tells it, this is not some radical new invention. It is not even a brand-new right. It is simply West Virginia fixing an inconsistency that never made much sense in the first place.
Before this bill, 18-to-20-year-olds in West Virginia could already openly carry a handgun. What they could not do, Noir noted, was conceal carry in the same way older adults could. The law, in his words, did not create a right out of thin air. It just brought concealed carry into line with the state’s existing open carry rules.
West Virginia’s Change Was Narrow, But It Was Real
Noir made a point of slowing the argument down before critics could race ahead. He stressed that this was not a case of the state suddenly allowing teenagers to run around armed with no legal limits.
The law applies to law-abiding adults, and that phrase mattered to him. As he put it, adults ages 18 to 20 who are not prohibited from possessing a firearm can now carry concealed without a license.
He also pointed to the NRA’s description of the bill as a “critical enhancement” of West Virginia’s constitutional carry law. That framing fit his argument perfectly. This was not a total overhaul. It was a correction.
That is an important distinction, even for people who are uneasy about lowering carry restrictions. The debate here is not about whether West Virginia suddenly discovered a new category of rights. It is about whether one class of legal adults should have been excluded from a carry method that is already widely accepted for everyone older.
On that point, Noir sounded less triumphant than blunt. The state already trusted these adults to possess and openly carry a handgun. Keeping concealed carry off-limits looked, to him, less like caution and more like contradiction.
The Core Question Is About Adulthood
This is where Colion’s argument really sharpened.
He said the anti-gun side has never honestly answered the bigger age question. Society tells 18-year-olds they are adults when it wants something from them. They can vote for the president. They can sign binding legal contracts. They can join the military, carry a rifle, and serve the country in uniform.
But when the same person wants to carry a handgun for self-defense at home, at work, or on the way back from a shift, suddenly they are treated as if they are not mature enough.
In Noir’s words, that is not a serious policy position. It is a contradiction.
It is a powerful argument because it is so simple. Either 18-year-olds are adults under the law, or they are not. If the state trusts them with civic power, legal obligations, and military service, singling out firearm carry starts to look less like principle and more like selective adulthood.
That does not automatically answer every safety concern, but it does force people to explain why gun rights are treated as the exception to the rule.
Lawmakers Made The Case In Their Own Words
Colion also played part of the House debate over the bill, and he did not pretend there was only one side worth hearing.
One supporter, Delegate Dave Foggin, argued in rough but direct terms that the issue was about whether an 18-year-old should be able to control his or her own safety. Noir admitted Foggin’s delivery was a little choppy, but said the point was right.
For him, that is the heart of the matter. The question is not whether the government feels emotionally comfortable with a young adult carrying a gun. The question is whether that adult gets to make decisions about personal safety without first asking the state for permission.
Then came the opposing view. Delegate Hollis Lewis spoke about having lost countless friends to violence at those same young ages and said lawmakers needed “common sense guardrails.”
Noir did not mock that. In fact, one of the stronger parts of his video was that he openly acknowledged the pain behind Lewis’s argument. He said that loss is real and not something to brush aside.
That matters, because too many debates on this issue fall into lazy shouting. Colion was clearly on one side, but he did not act like grief was fake just because he disagreed with the policy that some people draw from it.
Why Colion Thinks The “Guardrails” Argument Fails
Even while recognizing the emotion behind it, Noir said the common-sense-guardrails argument still falls apart when you examine who it actually affects.
His point was that the people committing murders are not the ones carefully following permit rules in the first place. The people who killed those friends, he argued, were not law-abiding 18-year-olds waiting to get a concealed carry permit before acting. They were already breaking the law.
That is the part Colion said nobody wants to say out loud.
Criminals, in his view, have been carrying guns with or without state approval for a very long time. A law like West Virginia’s does not arm criminals. It leaves them exactly where they already were. What it changes is the status of a lawful young adult who may want the ability to defend against them.
That is a familiar gun-rights argument, but it remains persuasive for one reason: it focuses on burden. Restrictions often fall most heavily on people trying to comply, not on the people most likely to ignore the law entirely.
Whether someone agrees with Noir’s conclusion or not, that tension is real. Laws aimed at public safety can still end up inconveniencing the careful while doing little to stop the reckless.
The Training Argument Sounds Better Than It Works
Noir also tackled one of the most common objections: training.
He said critics always come back to the same complaint that these young adults are not required to take a class before carrying. Colion’s answer was predictable but still worth hearing in full: he thinks everyone should get firearms training, including people who do not own guns.
But he does not think training should be mandated as a precondition for exercising a constitutional right.
That distinction is central to his worldview. He is not anti-training. He is anti-permission slip.
And when he asks people to name another right in the Bill of Rights that requires a government-approved class before it can be exercised, the question lands hard. It is one of those challenges that sounds rhetorical because it mostly is, but it also exposes a real problem in how firearm rights are often treated differently from other rights people claim to respect.
Still, this is probably where the other side has its strongest emotional footing. Many Americans hear “18-year-old” and “concealed carry” in the same sentence and immediately think of immaturity, impulsiveness, and avoidable tragedy. That concern is not irrational. It is rooted in fear about what can happen when youth and deadly force overlap.
The problem, as Noir sees it, is that fear often becomes an excuse for uneven standards. If adulthood counts in every other serious context, then treating gun rights as uniquely negotiable starts to look selective rather than principled.
Why This Win Matters Beyond One State
By the end of the video, Colion called West Virginia’s move a real win, not because it solved everything, but because it made concrete progress.
He said every state that passes a law like this strengthens the case for constitutional carry nationwide. That is how change often works in gun politics: not all at once, but state by state, one legal inconsistency at a time.
He also said something worth sitting with. The country is now celebrating that 18-year-olds in one state finally got a carry right they arguably should have had all along. In his view, that says a lot about how comfortable Americans have become with treating rights as things to be managed, delayed, or granted in pieces.
That may be the deepest point in his whole argument. Once a right becomes something that can be carved up by age, method, or bureaucratic condition, the debate stops being about whether it exists and starts becoming about how much of it the government is willing to tolerate.
West Virginia, at least in this case, decided the answer should be more straightforward. If an 18-year-old is old enough to be treated like an adult in the most serious parts of public life, then firearm rights should not be the one place where adulthood suddenly comes with an asterisk.
A former park ranger and wildlife conservationist, Lisa’s passion for survival started with her deep connection to nature. Raised on a small farm in northern Wisconsin, she learned how to grow her own food, raise livestock, and live off the land. Lisa is our dedicated Second Amendment news writer and also focuses on homesteading, natural remedies, and survival strategies. Lisa aims to help others live more sustainably and prepare for the unexpected.
