by Joseph P. Tartaro | Executive Editor
About 5% of the adult US population—over 11 million men and women—may now be legally carrying concealed in the United States, according to the latest survey by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), and the unconfirmed number of additional concealed carry licenses in some states may put the figure considerably higher.
Previous figures previously published are based on a December 2011 estimate of 8 million concealed carry permits released by the federal Government Accountability Office. The 11,113,013 number reported by the CPRC is based on a compilation of available data from the states completed in June 2014.
One of the reasons the data will likely always be incomplete is that the number of people legally carrying concealed is not available from all states that issue permits, such as New York. Additionally, the report notes, five states and the majority of Montana do not require that residents have a concealed handgun permit to carry within the state and the number of residents who do carry is not recorded.
Attempting to get data from New York, which requires a license both for carry and possession in the home or business, or for employment, is not publicly available. Some reasonable estimates for many years considered a figure of 500,000 licenses as realistic for the state, but that has come into question. Except for New York City, Westchester and parts of Long Island, New York licenses were lifetime licenses, “good until revoked.” Passage of the SAFE Act by New York in 2013 includes a provision that all licenses be recertified beginning in 2018.
News reports of a NY State Police pilot program to invite licensees in a few counties to begin recertifying their licenses beginning in March 2015, an action which has drawn some criticism from among both some law enforcement and the public, have uniformly cited a figure of 2 million pistol licenses. This figure includes both carry and premise permits, but would substantially increase the total number of people licensed to carry in the nation. It could even dethrone Florida as the state which the CPRC report says has issued the greatest number of carry licenses—1.2 million.
Further complicating attempts to get data from all states are those that do not tabulate all carry licenses. For example, the CPRC report notes that the figures for Utah included in the report are only for those permits issued to residents, while the New Hampshire numbers cited are only for out-of-state permits, not state residents.
But the number of Americans legally carrying concealed handguns is not the only information available from the CPRC report. The study also examines the violent crime rate in relation to the rising percentage of the adult population known to have concealed carry permits. Among those findings is the following:
“Between 2007 and the preliminary estimates for 2013, the murder rates have fallen from 5.6 to 4.4 per 100,000—a 22 percent drop in the murder rate at the same time that the percentage of the adult population with permits soared by 130 percent. Overall violent crime also fell by 22 percent over that period of time.”
The CPRC is headed by economist John Lott, PhD, author of More Guns=Less Crime and several other books tracking crime and firearms trends. The study, released in July 2014 is titled “Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States” and is available on the website: crimepreventionresearchcenter.org.
See the state-by-state data (above, right).
