By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
He says he passed a background check stricter than Colorado’s. He holds a carry permit that is good in more than 30 states. He owns a second home in Weld County. And when Greg Howeth applied for a Colorado permit this spring, a Weld County employee called to tell him no — because he does not have a Colorado ID.
That denial, delivered by email on May 28, is now Exhibit 2 in a federal lawsuit against the City and County of Denver, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, and five other officials.
Howeth, a South Carolina man named Zackary Dougherty, and the National Rifle Association filed the case in U.S. District Court in Denver on Aug. 12.
Their claim is not that any single Colorado law is unconstitutional. It is that three of them, stacked together, leave visitors like Howeth and Dougherty with no legal way to carry a handgun in Denver.
How the three laws lock together
Start with the permit.
Colorado sheriffs must issue a concealed-handgun permit only to someone who is “a legal resident of the state of Colorado.”
Out-of-state applicants do not qualify, with a narrow exception for service members on permanent-duty orders at a Colorado military installation and their immediate family living in the state.
That is why Howeth was turned away in Weld County even though he owns a second home there.
Then there is reciprocity.
Colorado honors an out-of-state permit only if the holder is a resident of the state that issued it, shown by a matching driver’s license or ID.
Howeth carries a Utah nonresident permit. Under that statute his residency has to match, and it does not. He lives in Hawaii, not Utah.
That leaves open carry.
Most of Colorado allows it. Denver does not. City ordinance makes it unlawful to carry a pistol, revolver, rifle or shotgun openly, with exceptions for permit holders carrying concealed and for a firearm inside a private vehicle.
A visitor cannot get a Colorado permit. Howeth’s Utah nonresident permit is not recognized. And the fallback other Coloradans have — open carry — is banned inside the city.
The complaint calls the result a complete prohibition on carrying for self-defense for nonresidents like them who travel to Denver.
Two men, two dead ends
Howeth flies into Denver International to see family, run errands, and reach his Weld County home. He submitted a receipt from a Denver McDonald’s as proof he spends time in the city.
In Hawaii, where he lives, he carries a handgun legally. To qualify to carry there, the complaint says, he passed more stringent background and mental-health screening and more training than Colorado requires.
Dougherty lived in Loveland until August 2025, and his employer is still there.
On April 19, he tried to apply through the Denver Police Department’s online concealed-handgun portal. Because he is no longer a Colorado resident, the system would not let him submit an application at all.
Neither man is accused of anything that would bar him from owning a gun. The disqualifier in both cases is where they legally reside.
A campaign that arrives in Colorado with a record
The lawsuit is the latest in a run of nearly identical challenges to nonresident carry rules, brought by a small set of Second Amendment litigators and gun-rights groups across several states.
One of Howeth’s attorneys, Alan Beck, argued this year’s Supreme Court gun case, Wolford v. Lopez.
The complaint relies on those earlier cases. The record behind them is real but narrower than a quick read suggests.
In California, a federal judge struck down the state’s nonresident ban in July 2025. The same judge dissolved that injunction in January 2026, after California rewrote the statute it had blocked.
A second California injunction reached only members of a handful of named gun groups, and that case settled this month.
In New York, a judge ordered the state to let nonresidents apply, though the same ruling rejected the plaintiffs’ Full Faith and Credit and interstate-privileges theories.
In Hawaii, a stipulated order opened permits only to the named plaintiff and about 900 members of a gun group.
None of those are binding on a Colorado federal court. Each was a trial-court order or a settlement, and in California the state rewrote its law, displacing one of the injunctions.
Colorado’s own precedent
The closest case is one the complaint cites, but only in passing.
In 2013, the Tenth Circuit rejected a similar challenge by Gray Peterson, a Washington resident who applied for a Denver permit, was denied for lack of Colorado residency, and held out-of-state permits — including a Utah one — that Colorado would not honor.
Peterson stated two of the same pieces that the new suit attacks, the state residency rule and Denver’s ordinance, left him disarmed in the city.
The court ruled against him, holding that concealed carry fell outside the Second Amendment’s protection. The Howeth complaint cites Peterson too, but for a narrow procedural point about which officials enforce the permit law, not for that holding.
That holding rests on pre-Bruen law.
The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision reworked how these cases are judged, leaving open whether Peterson still controls.
There is also a difference in how the two suits were built.
Peterson declined to challenge Denver’s ordinance, and the Tenth Circuit said it saw no reason a plaintiff could not challenge both the statute and the ordinance together.
The Howeth complaint does exactly that.
The precedent that cuts back
The complaint also cites Massachusetts, where the state’s high court threw out an old nonresident licensing law in March 2025. But it struck that law because it gave a state official discretion to deny permits, not because it treated nonresidents differently.
On the same day, in a companion case, the same court upheld Massachusetts’s current nonresident licensing scheme against Second Amendment, right-to-travel and equal-protection challenges.
That ruling gives the state an argument, though the fit is not exact.
Massachusetts lets a qualified nonresident apply for and receive a license. Colorado does not offer nonresidents that option at all, which is the threshold the plaintiffs are attacking.
What Massachusetts supports is the narrower point that a state may require nonresidents to clear a fixed, non-discretionary licensing standard.
Colorado is generally a shall-issue state, though sheriffs keep some room to deny an otherwise qualified applicant based on documented behavior showing a danger to self or others.
The plaintiffs answer with history.
The complaint runs through dozens of 18th- and 19th-century laws that banned concealed carry but carved out exceptions for travelers, arguing that visitors historically got more carry latitude, not less.
Under the Supreme Court’s Bruen test, the government must show a modern restriction is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Howeth’s lawyers say no such tradition exists for disarming nonresidents.
The state has not yet filed its response. When it does, the fight will be over whether a residency line drawn through a permit system is the kind of rule the nation’s history allows.