Who May Train You? Instructor Verification Is Fragmented

Forty-one of fifty-one jurisdictions require training before they will issue a carry permit. The certificate is not optional and not a formality: without it the application fails.

Our dataset links 23 instructor-registry or verification URLs, but those links do not all represent statewide searchable rosters. Some are local, some are available only on request, and some point to an outside certifying body.

That distinction matters. A missing statewide search page can be a real consumer problem, but it is not the same as proving that a state has no verification path. The four examples below show different kinds of fragmentation.

Where the gap does not much matter

Most of the training-required states without a statewide searchable roster are fine, because their statutes do the work a roster would. They name the bodies whose certification counts, and the applicant can check the credential with that body directly.

The NRA is the load-bearing institution here. Arizona, Iowa, Missouri, North Carolina, Oregon, West Virginia and Wyoming all write NRA courses or NRA-certified instructors into the statute as a way of satisfying the requirement, and Alaska makes the NRA personal protection course expressly approvable. Montana stops just short of the name, accepting a course from “a national firearms association” without specifying which. North Carolina goes further and names its acceptable sponsors outright in G.S. 14-415.12(a)(4): the state’s own Criminal Justice Education and Training Standards Commission, the NRA, the U.S. Concealed Carry Association, and law enforcement training institutions.

Several add routes that have nothing to do with a commercial course at all. Montana accepts a hunter education course run by Fish, Wildlife & Parks. Oregon accepts one approved by ODFW. Wisconsin accepts a hunter education certificate, or an unexpired carry license from another state. Virginia’s § 18.2-308.02(B) is a menu and expressly bars an issuing officer from demanding anything beyond it.

In all of those, a state roster would be a convenience. Its absence is not a trap, because the statute tells you what to buy.

Where verification is fragmented

Four states illustrate four different versions of the verification problem.

California requires 16 hours “taught and supervised by a DOJ-certified firearms instructor” under Penal Code § 26165. The DOJ’s public guidance directs applicants to their local licensing authority for information about authorized instructors; there is no single statewide searchable roster in that guidance.

New York requires 18 hours under Penal Law § 400.00(19) — 16 of in-person curriculum plus two of live fire, with an 80% written exam. Its official minimum standards describe qualified instructors and statutory categories that are deemed approved; that is not the same as DCJS individually approving and publishing a statewide roster of every instructor.

Colorado requires 8 in-person hours taught by a “verified instructor,” verified by a county sheriff under C.R.S. 18-12-202.7. This is the newest of the four: HB24-1174 repealed the old “certified instructor” category outright on 1 July 2025 and replaced it with sheriff verification, with no grace period. Verification now sits with sixty-four separate sheriffs, and no statewide roster of verified instructors has appeared.

Hawaii requires the instructor to be “certified or verified by the county chief of police,” or certified by a nongovernmental organization the chief has approved, and to sign a certificate stating the applicant’s actual numeric score. The counties set their own minimums above the statute’s silence — four classroom hours in Honolulu and Hawaiʻi County, six on Maui. Honolulu Police says its verified-instructor list is available at its firearms windows on request, so the problem is fragmented access rather than proof that no list exists.

The four are not the same failure, and that matters: New York has nothing to publish because it approves nobody individually, while Colorado has sixty-four sheriffs who each approve people and no one collecting the answer. What they share is what it costs the applicant. Before paying for a course you must first work out which office to ask, and then ask it.

What that costs the applicant

Training is bought before the application is decided, from a private business, at the applicant’s own risk. In the 16-hour states it runs $150 to $350 and is the single largest line in the cost of the permit — larger than the state’s own fee. An applicant who buys it from someone the agency has not approved has bought nothing, and finds out after paying.

California is the only one of the four that has thought about the money at all. Penal Code § 26165 forbids charging an applicant for training until the licensing authority has determined they are not a disqualified person — a real protection against paying for a course you were never eligible to use. It does nothing about paying an instructor the DOJ never certified.

The heaviest hour counts in the country are New York and D.C. at 18. D.C. publishes an MPD-certified instructor page. New York publishes standards and statutory instructor categories that are deemed approved — a fragmented path, not a secret roster. California’s 16-hour course is the large-dollar case without a statewide search page.

It is not a hard problem

The clinching detail is that the same system, run the same way, is transparent almost everywhere else it exists.

The District of Columbia requires 18 hours from an MPD-certified instructor and publishes a page called, in terms, Concealed Carry Training Instructors Certified by MPD. Illinois requires 16 hours of ISP-approved training and runs a searchable public database. Maryland requires 16 hours from a Maryland Qualified Handgun Instructor and provides a verification lookup. All three impose more training than Colorado or Hawaii, and two match or exceed California.

So the objection cannot be that a list is burdensome to maintain. D.C., Illinois and Maryland already publish one. California, New York, Colorado and Hawaii present four different access problems — local office, statutory category, sixty-four sheriffs, on-request window — not one hidden-approval system. Colorado’s own statute requires each sheriff to post a verified- instructor list. Absence of a statewide roster is not absence of a legal duty.

A footnote on the ones that do publish

Having a list is not the same as having a usable one. Of the twenty-three registry URLs, exactly four can be read by anything other than a person sitting at a browser. The rest are published in ways that defeat automated access without meaning to: search forms that return nothing without a live session, documents rather than pages, a CAPTCHA in Minnesota, and outright blocking of datacenter traffic in Kansas and Massachusetts. All of them work fine for the reader they were built for, which is a person with a browser.

New Mexico’s official registry of 334 certified instructors is a Google Sheets link.

We mirror the four that can be read — North Dakota’s 139 test administrators, Mississippi’s 1,001 instructors, New Mexico’s 334 and Tennessee’s 22 schools, 1,496 entries in total — and link to the rest, because a link to a roster a reader can actually open is worth more than a scraped copy of one we cannot verify.

What we are less sure about

Twenty-three is a count of registry or verification URLs, not of equivalent statewide rosters. We record a source we could find and link to. A state that maintains a list internally, provides it on request, or delegates qualification to an outside body can look very different to an applicant even when both have a URL. The categories need to remain separate.

New Jersey is the unclear case. It requires the instructor to upload a copy of their own certification with the application, but the source material does not establish who issues that certification. We have left it out of both groups rather than assign it to the wrong one.

Sheriff-level and county-level approval may be published locally. Colorado’s verification sits with sixty-four sheriffs and Hawaii’s with four county police chiefs. Individual offices may well publish their own verified instructors even though no statewide roster exists. What we can say is that there is no single place to look, which for an applicant choosing a course is most of the problem.

Per-state training requirements, with the statute behind each one, are on the state guides.

Verify before paying. Instructor qualifications, approved course formats, and local lists can change. Confirm the instructor and course with the issuing authority or named certifying body before enrolling.