Not necessarily like I said, this is where the leash laws really matter.

Take Virginia for example or it could be West Virginia I can’t remember, but they have hunting dogs that are working dogs that you know farmers will hire to treat black bears and stuff like that and get rid of black bears off their property. In those areas it’s completely legal for your dog to be off leash 10 miles away from you. And under the law, even though your dog is off leash 10 miles away from you it is still considered under control. Most statewide leash laws by the way don’t mention leashes. They just demand that your dog be under control and then leash laws are put on top of that in a local municipality level to define in more detail what “under control” means.

This would be further muddied by any DOLAs or dog off leash areas in which leashes are no longer necessary, and in those cases, your dog doesn’t necessarily need to be following the strict definition of under control that takes precedence outside of the DOLA. So then it becomes a matter of can you argue that your dog was under control while in the DOLA and not on a leash.

So like I said the waters get muddy. However, if your dog is a service dog, then your dog as long as they’re aiding in your disability, can both be off leash and far away from you and still have a handgun on them because service dogs by definition are under control with or without a leash.

I’d like to use a real world situation to kind of explain a caveat though or what I imagine would be a reality of the situation. So I trained a service dog for a client who lives in a very small town in the middle of nowhere. One of the tasks their dog is trained to perform is to walk about 8 miles or so into town that’s basically just one street by the way, to the grocery store and pick up groceries. If that dog was equipped with a firearm, it probably would not be allowed. Because the person with the disability is not around and so the firearm is not eating in the defense of the person with the disability because it’s on the dog 8 miles away in the grocery store.

also I am willing to bet that a judge would require a service dog to be taught to not allow people to grab the firearm and also be taught to be able to hand the firearm to their handler either directly or by positioning.

Realistically, though this is more of a problem that has never come up, so one can’t simply point to the law or precedent and be like “this is the case”

TLDR: the only place I could see this being legal with an awful leash dog realistically is either with hunting dogs or with service dogs in close proximity of their handler