Visual Impairment and Public Carry
Every state tests vision during the initial driver’s license application process and imposes some form of low-vision cutoff before issuing a license. For guns, however, there is no such uniformity. Many states do allow those with severely impaired vision to obtain firearms—and the recent spread of permitless, or constitutional, carry almost certainly makes it easier for the vision-impaired to carry guns in public for self-defense. Does this dichotomy make sense?
Blindness is not an all-or-nothing condition but rather a spectrum of visual impairment.[1] The federal government sets minimum vision requirements for commercial driver’s licenses, but states employ their own standards for personal licenses which can vary widely. Most states require somewhere between 20/40 and 20/70 vision in the better eye—occasionally resulting in a restricted license. Some, such as Wisconsin and Oklahoma, require only 20/100 vision in a single eye. And many states also require a certain degree of visual field, or amount of peripheral vision. The following chart gives a rough sense of what the numbers represent:
Source: https://www.illustratedverdict.com/template-eye-eye-exams
In many ways, driver’s licenses are a natural comparison for gun licensing—two areas where an important activity with serious potential public safety consequences often requires a license from the government and where vision is of particular importance. The Supreme Court has held that the “constitutional right to travel from one State to another, and necessarily to use the highways and other instrumentalities of interstate commerce in doing so, occupies a position fundamental to the concept of our Federal Union.” Yet that right is subject to “appropriate means adopted by the states to insure competence and care on the part of its licensees and to protect others using the highway.”
Detailed state-by-state information on gun licensing for those with visual impairments is not easy to find. Rather, the issue has entered the public consciousness only intermittently through high-profile events involving visually-impaired individuals who obtain or seek to obtain firearms. A blind Indiana man, for example, recently purchased a firearm as a symbolic gesture to bring attention to the what he called “the paradox of needing to pass a driver’s test to drive a car but not [] to own a machine designed specifically to extinguish life.” 2013 reporting from Iowa indicated that the state was “granting gun permits to people who are legally or completely blind, . . . [including] people whose visual impairments are such that they can’t legally drive.” And a blind New Jersey man was involved in a lengthy saga with the state over his personal gun collection, involving potential alcohol abuse and a self-inflicted gunshot wound.
Advocates for the visually impaired tend to focus on the issue of judgment rather than physical incapacity. For example, a 2014 essay published on the National Federation of the Blind’s website argues that
Those who reflexively say that blind people should not possess guns are likely doing so under the mistaken belief that blind people are intrinsically unable to exercise good judgment or due care when deciding whether to own or discharge a firearm. . . . Although a large portion of the public, including some who are blind, may also be uncomfortable with the concept of blind people purchasing or owning guns, to restrict them solely on the basis of blindness would diminish the rights of people who are blind and ultimately of all Americans.
And those advocating for individuals with disabilities have argued “that denying citizens a gun permit based on sight impairment would violate the Americans with Disabilities Act.”
The visually impaired are not barred from possessing guns under federal law, and state approaches vary. Even the strictest states don’t tend to mention vision specifically or require a vision test for gun licenses, though their licensing rules do include language about conditions that could make it unsafe to possess or wield a gun. For example, New York’s concealed carry licensing law refers to “having the essential character, temperament and judgement necessary to be entrusted with a weapon and to use it only in a manner that does not endanger oneself or others.” California law contains a similar catch-all provision that disqualifies an applicant who “[i]s reasonably likely to be a danger to self, others, or the community at large, as demonstrated by anything in the application for a license.” This language could be broad enough to capture visual impairment, in certain circumstances, and it may also be difficult for such individuals to complete training in states that require it. But even the most restrictive state approaches don’t rule out issuing permits to the visually impaired or set a minimum vision floor.
Other states may attempt to harmonize the approach to firearm licenses with that used for drivers’ licenses. For example, until the state adopted permitless carry in 2023, Nebraska required that applicants for a concealed carry license either have a state-issued driver’s license (and thus meet the associated minimum vision standards) or submit a separate vision statement if relying on a different form of state ID. The state continues to issue concealed carry permits on this basis to those seeking them for reciprocity or other reasons. Nebraska’s recent evolution is broadly representative of the 29 states with permitless carry. These laws almost universally allow guns to be carried by anyone who is over a minimum age and not otherwise disqualified by law from possessing a gun. Even those with serious visual impairments are not prohibited persons and thus will qualify. And, unlike in states that continue to mandate a permit for concealed carry, there will be no permit-related consequences for misuse of a firearm.
Does it make policy sense for gun carry permitting to be more lenient than driver licensing for those with visual impairments? While the use of guns in home self-defense scenarios may be a different situation, and one where good judgment is disproportionately important, carrying guns in public raises a host of trickier issues with regard to the visually impaired. At a minimum, states might consider adopting Nebraska’s pre-2023 approach and using the driver’s license vision standard as a guide for when concealed carry license decisions receive closer scrutiny due to visual impairment—such as, for example, an additional training course or demonstration that safe firearm use is possible.
[1] As used throughout the post, this term refers to low vision that cannot be corrected by wearing glasses or otherwise.