John “More Guns, Less Crime” Lott has created a new gun rights org dedicated to arming armed Americans with the truth about guns. Well, the facts. crimepreventionresearchcenter.org’s opening salvo: Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States. Click here to read the study, which is as stat-heavy as you’d expect from the Lottster. Summarizing the summary, “a total of 11,113,013 Americans currently hold concealed carry permits representing 4.8 percent of the total population . . . concealed carry has grown overall due to both more states allowing it and more and more people in each state getting permits.” Lott reckons the number of good-to-stow Americans is actually greater . . .
Numbers are not available for all states that issue permits, such as New York. Additionally, four states and the majority of Montana do not require that residents have a concealed handgun permit to carry within the state so the number of residents who carry a concealed weapon is not recorded.
As TTAG commentator CBI notes below, the five percent stat represents the number of concealed carry permit holders as a percentage of America’s adult population. Equally, that’s about 13 times the number of federal, state, and local sworn law enforcement officers.”
There’s a Lott more in the study regarding rising ownership correlated with falling crime rates. As other observers have noted, the rising number of Americans carrying firearms may not be responsible for the drop, but it certainly indicates that concealed carry doesn’t increase crime rates. To say the least.