West Virginia Concealed Carry Permit

West Virginia law does not prohibit building a firearm for personal use, does not require a serial number on a self-made firearm, and has no firearm registration scheme. This is a finding of ABSENCE of law rather than an affirmative authorization. The full section index of Chapter 61, Article 7 was re-read on 2026-09-15 (§61-7-1 Legislative findings through §61-7-17 Construction of article, with §61-7-3 now repealed and §61-7-13 repealed in 1990) and no section addresses self-manufacture, unfinished receivers, "ghost guns," or serialization; §61-7-2 (Definitions) defines fifteen terms and mentions no serial number; and §61-7-10, which some secondary summaries wrongly describe as a serial-number statute, was read in full and deals only with selling, renting, giving or lending weapons to prohibited persons. The WV Attorney General's July 2026 firearms guide is likewise silent on the subject. §8-12-5a reinforces this by voiding municipal ordinances "designed or enforced to effectively restrict or prohibit the sale, purchase, transfer, manufacture, repair, or display of firearms," so no WV city may impose its own rule either. IMPORTANT: federal law still applies independently — a self-made firearm may not be an NFA item without ATF approval, may not be undetectable under 18 U.S.C. §922(p), may not be made by a prohibited person, and may not be manufactured for sale or distribution without a federal manufacturer's license. Because the official code site's full-text search is non-functional (see uncertainties), a relevant provision located outside Chapter 61, Article 7 cannot be completely ruled out.

No provision — W. Va. Code ch. 61, art. 7 (§§61-7-1 through 61-7-17) contains no section addressing self-manufacture, serialization, or registration of firearms. See also W. Va. Code §8-12-5a (state preemption of municipal firearm regulation, expressly voiding local ordinances restricting the "manufacture" of firearms) and W. Va. Code §61-7-9 (machine guns).

Federal law, gunsmithing schools, and tools →

What we could not confirm

• WVSP TLS PROBLEM, NOT A URL PROBLEM. www.wvsp.gov is the correct and only working host for the issuing-authority and application URLs: it returned HTTP 200 for the forms index and for both PDF forms on 2026-09-15. However it serves an INCOMPLETE certificate chain — the handshake presents only the leaf (CN=wvsp.gov, O=Tyler Technologies, issued by DigiCert Global G2 TLS RSA SHA256 2020 CA1) with no intermediate — so strict clients that do not fetch intermediates via AIA will fail to validate it. This is a server misconfiguration to be tolerated or whitelisted in the link checker, not a URL to replace. Do NOT substitute either alternative: the apex wvsp.gov resolves to no address at all, and wvsp.org is an unrelated parked domain that bounces to a "/lander" page.
• RECIPROCITY LIST IS A DERIVATION, NOT A PUBLISHED INBOUND LIST. West Virginia publishes no standalone list of out-of-state permits it honors. §61-7-6a(a)(4) defines inbound recognition as contingent on the other state recognizing WV CHLs, so the 36-state list was derived from the AG's official outbound reciprocity map by excluding the 12 red "does not recognize WV license" states and then excluding Vermont, which issues no permit. This is legally grounded but is not a verbatim official inbound list.
• The AG reciprocity map is still dated October 1, 2025 — about eight months before HB 4106 took effect and eleven and a half months before today. The AG's reciprocity page was checked on 2026-09-15 and still links only that map; no newer official map exists. Reciprocity status can change without notice, so a state's status may have changed since October 2025.
• §61-7-6a(e) and (g) require the West Virginia State Police to maintain a reciprocity registry and to make a public list of reciprocity/recognition states available. No such WVSP list exists online. The only WVSP page that addresses out-of-state permits is the Legal Division FAQ, which is badly obsolete — it states "Currently, no other out-of-state concealed carry permits are honored" and "You must be a West Virginia resident to obtain a West Virginia permit," both false since 2016-17 — and its "current agreements" link points at the dead legacy URL http://www.wvago.gov/gunrecep.cfm, which now redirects only to the AG home page. Anyone relying on that WVSP page would be badly misinformed.
• The statutory inbound reciprocity conditions in §61-7-6a(a) require the out-of-state permit holder to be 21 or older AND a non-resident of West Virginia — narrower than permitless carry under §61-7-7(c), which has no residency requirement and a minimum age of 18. No official guidance reconciling how these two provisions interact for an 18-20 year old non-resident permit holder could be found, though the plain text of §61-7-7(c) appears to let such a person carry permitless regardless.
• THE ATTORNEY GENERAL'S CONSUMER-FACING FEE AND AGE TEXT IS WRONG. The AG's Gun Reciprocity FAQ web page and the FAQ section of the AG's July 2026 booklet both state a CHL costs "$75.00 to the sheriff at the time you apply" plus "an additional $25.00 prior to issuance," and the FAQ web page still says permitless carry requires being "at least 21 years of age." Both are contradicted by current statute, by the statutory text reproduced verbatim in the AG's own booklet, and by WVSP Form 44A. The record reports $50 and age 18 on that basis, and no 2026 act changed §61-7-4 (HB 5660 died in committee; the last enacted amendment was SB 147 in 2024). What remains unresolved is why the AG's own consumer-facing text is wrong and whether any county sheriff actually collects $75 in practice — an applicant should confirm the amount with their county sheriff before applying.
• NO STATE INSTRUCTOR REGISTRY LOCATED. §61-7-4(e)(3) accepts courses taught by "a handgun instructor certified as such by the state or by the National Rifle Association," but no West Virginia page listing state-certified instructors could be found, and no evidence of a state instructor certification program exists; searching surfaced only commercial training directories, which are not cited. instructorRegistryUrl is reported as null; whether a registry exists but is unpublished could not be confirmed.
• HOME MANUFACTURE IS AN ABSENCE-OF-LAW FINDING, AND THE CODE'S FULL-TEXT SEARCH IS BROKEN. Chapter 61, Article 7 was re-checked section by section and contains no self-manufacture, serialization or registration provision, and §61-7-10 and §61-7-2 were read in full to rule out serial-number language that secondary summaries wrongly attribute to them. A full-text search of the whole West Virginia Code was attempted via the official search box at code.wvlegislature.gov, but it returns "yielded 0 results" for every term tested, including terms certainly present in the code such as "concealed" and "machine gun", with or without a chapter parameter — so the search facility is non-functional and its zero results prove nothing. A relevant provision outside Chapter 61, Article 7 therefore cannot be completely excluded.
• The District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other U.S. territories do not appear on the AG reciprocity map, which covers the 50 states only, so West Virginia's treatment of their permits is unknown.
• The commonly cited May 24, 2016 effective date for West Virginia's original permitless-carry act (HB 4145) comes from Attorney General guidance rather than from the bill-status page, which records only the March 4-5, 2016 veto overrides and completion as Chapter 252 on May 13, 2016. The 2016 enactment year behind permitlessCarry.sinceYear is confirmed from primary sources; the precise effective date within 2016 is not.