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RF's everyday carry (courtesy thetruthaboutguns.com)

“We estimate that nine million US adult handgun owners carry loaded handguns monthly,” The American Journal of Public Health concludes in its report Loaded Handgun Carrying Among US Adults, 2015. “Three million do so every day, and most report protection as the main carrying reason. Proportionally fewer handgun owners carry concealed loaded handguns in states that allow issuing authorities substantial discretion in granting carrying permits.” In other words . . .

In states that piss on the Second Amendment to the United State Constitution, fewer people carry loaded — loaded! — handguns than citizens residing in states that respect our founding document’s prohibition against government infringement on Americans’ right to keep and bear arms. Who’d a thunk it?

Not The Trace. For some reason, Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun agitprop machine doesn’t make that connection between gun control and carry. (And I bet they didn’t have to pay to download the study.) Their email blast has this to say about that . . .

Those gun carriers are engaging in a behavior that if not invented by the NRA, was steadily cultivated by the group over the past three decades. [Bold text theirs.]

The new research, authored by researchers at Harvard University, Northeastern University, the University of Washington, and the University of Colorado, sheds light on the demographics of regular gun carriers.

He is most likely to be:a conservative middle-aged white male

– living in a suburban Southern community
– raised around guns
– motivated by a perceived need for self defense
– not threatened by another person with a gun in the last five years

Twenty-percent of carriers are veterans, and less than 30 percent have children.

WHAT? Less than 30 percent of Americans carrying everyday have children? OK, they lost me.

Especially when you consider that John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center reckons there are over 16.3 million permit holders in the U.S. Dividing Lott’s total by the AJPH’s 3m daily carry stat, only 18 percent of Americans with permits carry every day. That doesn’t seem right, does it?

Anyway, I haven’t lost my determination to carry everyday, wherever I can. Nor, I suspect, have you — even if you live in one of the aforementioned Constitutionally corrupt states. The question is, how do we convince more Americans to carry?

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61 COMMENTS

  1. Deploy them to Iraq, make them all carry the 240 B, and upon returning issue them an M9 to carry. They’ll forget they even have an M9 on their hip in minutes.

  2. I’ll be 59 in a month. Live in a northern state. Have kids.
    I’m a liberal conservative, and since I retired a semi-hazardous line of work, haven’t been threatened by anyone.
    And I carry.
    Every day. I guess out of habit and also out of a strong desire for self preservation.

        • So have universal hot and cold running free pot as their only “litmus test”. Glad someone could clear that up.

        • Yes, libertarian. While many associate libertarian with a few candidates they despise due to the candidates bizarre 2a position, it is widely accepted that the group of citizens who value the liberal tradition, pre-socialist liberalism, are today most aligned with libertarians or moderate republicans. The view is this, that the liberal tradition that evolved in opposition to royal authority, guilds, and monopolies…does not imply that what is now called “social liberalism” (aka progressive democrats) should be accepted. Classical or conservative liberalism believes in the supremacy of the legislature over any heritable nobility, in universal suffrage, and the rights to liberty, property, and the rule of citizen-made law, justice. We based our nation on the early liberalism generally attributed to John Locke, in his Two Treatises on Government.

          The “social liberalism” seems to end up all too often as more socialism than liberalism, and both of these are opposed principally by fascism (often today called anti-fascism) and communism (masquarading as “we need more government in every sphere of life, with all important institutions owned by the government). Discuss……

  3. Simple… Start lowering insurance premiums to reflect the positive impact that concealed carry has on hospitalization due to criminal acts.

    • That’s a difficult line to draw between cause and effect, from a risk management standpoint, even if the linkage actually exists, but I like your thinking.

  4. By reducing the regulatory land mines and restricted areas? It is a hassle for the wannabe law abiding carrier to know where you can and can’t and under what circumstances, probably some don’t carry because they don’t want to or can’t sort it out. Others probably carry where they aren’t supposed to because they thought they were allowed.

    The private property area is a tricky part. I would like to carry at work but it seems larger corporations, probably for insurance/political reasons, just issue a “no weapons” policy. I know, leave and start your own company, sure. But maybe there could be some kind it incentive in regulation passed to encourage it. Tax deduction, some kind of liability protection? Friend of freedom award? Not likely I guess, but my gun will do little sitting in my locked car in the parking garage.

    • ^^^ This.^^^

      And the most dangerous part of my day is the walk back to my car. Lots of bums and drug addicts around the parking lot.

    • Agreed, I work in DC in a federal Building. If you look at the map, even if guns were not prohibited in my parking garage, I could not legally get to work without riding through a prohibited zone. Then the cost of the registration, the 10 round magazines and the permit proces. I’ll wait for reciprocity.

  5. How do “we” get folks to carry? Not my business. We’re having a garage sale at my home right now and I’m carrying my Taurus 709 in a Nemesis pocket holster. I barely know it’s there. Yeah there are multiple places I can’t carry-especially in Illinois. Indiana not so much. Everyone who carries has to figure it out.

  6. I love how they play with language. Hide something they don’t like.

    “less than 30 percent have children” Translation – More than 70 percent who carry guns have kids, and probably carry to protect them.

  7. I don’t trust myself to know all the picayune legal niceties of where it is legal to carry.

    The places I do know of are too weird — post offices no, post office parking lots maybe?

    Within 1000 feet of a school, where the boundaries are not clearly established?

    I do not live a life of danger, or play stupid games with stupid people in stupid places at stupid times. I believe my liberty is far more at hazard from carrying in a verboten place than from not carrying.

    So there’s your answer: simplify the damned carry rules!

    • I want OPEN CARRY FREE-FIRE ZONES.

      Places where you can cap-off in properly laid out public areas in order to verify proper function and accuracy of your concealed carry weapon. GET PEOPLE USED TO THE SOUND OF GUN FIRE.

      If you practice drawing your weapon in a controlled area, you should practice it on the street and move directly to firing and other movement.

    • Any areas forbidding carry must be marked on all adjoining paved surfaces in the designated area, with a painted sign on the pavement in 8″ high RED letters “FREE FIRE ZONE”. Markings to repeat with 12′ spacing and must be repainted every 7 days,

  8. Oh lordy…..I don’t want to write a book report this early in the morning, I haven’t even finished my coffee! If I get into this, it’s going to tread on weapon, holster and caliber wars and we all know where that will take us.

    Let me preface this with little factoid once more, no weapon, caliber or holster is perfect for everyone, all the time.
    Let’s keep this narrow and leave the difficulties that the female gender commonly experience trying to comfortably carry concealed out of his and instead examine why it is that those folks that wanted to carry, tried it few times and stopped. What happened? I don’t subscribe to the notion that it is some societal moral difficulty. It’s much simpler and basic than a persons inner struggles with carrying a lethal weapon capable of taking a life instantly. Most of us have that daily ability driving our vehicle down a public roadway.

    ATFagentbob hit the nail on the head. Face it, we are carrying around a chunk of metal, plastic or polymer that to be effective, are rather large and heavy. Yes yes and this is what I want to avoid as there are many tiny little pocket pistols, but then we start into the weapon and caliber wars and that is what we are staying out of because yes we could all shoot like Jerry and Hickock45 and carry a tiny .22 and be bad asses.

    It’s a mindset. To effectively enter into the mindset that we WILL NOT be a victim, that we will defend ourselves takes the will and determination to carry a weapon religiously. For the newbie beginner, that is changing our daily habit of the things we carry, our wallet, keys, phone, our “daily carry” and now adding something significant. That is a lot for most people. To get past that initial uncomfortable feeling of having that weapon on ones person, it has to be carried a LOT. As ATF Bob said, carry a large weapon around all the time and see what happens. That’s essentially it. The weapon has to be carried all the time, everywhere, in the house, when your mowing, ALL THE TIME until the person feels naked without it. When you leave the house and your don’t have your weapon, you feel like you’re missing something.

    As I mentioned, this is a mindset. Carrying a weapon doesn’t do a bit of good if you can’t draw and shoot or won’t draw and shoot. Practice practice practice. Embrace the mindset, carry and practice. Stay in focus, carry and practice. Admittedly, this seems like a lot and it is. This is evidenced by the shockingly low numbers of people who actually carry. Concealed carry permit numbers don’t accurately reflect those who carry. Of the four folks I know who have a valid permit, only one carries his weapon to work with him and has it on him when he leaves.

  9. What the real question here: How do we get more people to carry, or how do we get more people who already carry to admit it?

    • Ralph, would you answer truthfully when someone you don’t know calls you on the phone to ask you this kind of question?

      • I would not. Even the Dr., during a physical, get’s an audible “FV<K-THE-WHAT ??? ! ! !", and he drops the GENERAL ELECTRIC HILLARY-OBAMA MEDICAL RECORDS DATABASE QUESTIONNAIRE questions.

      • “Ralph, would you answer truthfully”

        Not a chance, @Rusty Chains. That’s my point. If 3mm are projected to carry every day through some “survey,” the real number is likely to be far higher.

  10. I doubt their statistics based on the demographic information they list.

    Does attacker present no threat if armed with a knife instead of a gun? Should you quit carrying because it has been more than five years since you were attacked?

    Remember that a bunch of idiots with calculators said Hillary had a ninety percent chance of being elected president.

    • “because it has been more than five years…”

      “A gentleman rarely needs a pistol, but when he does need one, he needs it very badly.” —Winston Churchill

  11. Hmmm…I look at where the report came from (The American Journal of Public Health) and I immediately see a problem. Don’t public health advocates want to study and do research on guns to prove they are a public health problem and thus work against freedom? They do. And I ask who or what organization paid for this study. Therefore, when I see who published the report, I immediately write it off as a leftist anti-gun hack and ignore its results. IMHO, any doodles by John Lott would have more credibility. The anti-gun side seems to be lining up its preferred researchers to “prove” that guns and liberty are dangerous to society at large. On the other hand…just remember (to paraphrase Sir Isaac Newton) that for every study or research paper proving a certain point, there is an equal and opposite research paper to refute it for the other side.

    You can categorize research papers by who cites them. Thus:
    Any research papers or polls cited by the enemies of freedom (i.e. the Washington Post and its ilk) = bad.
    Any research papers or polls cited by the friends of liberty (i.e., the NRA and its ilk) = good.

  12. We estimate (because no one has a stomach to pop that zit) that the Trace demographics are regular bunch of POS (D) piss ant tyrant gun grabbers.

    zHe is most likely to be a liberal POS immature sexually fluid possibly human

    – living in a ball of snakes urban-inbred, short on oxygen, high on crime, liberal (D) community
    – raised around zhis two dads
    – motivated by a overt need to serve the POS (D) and satan
    – not threatened by another person with a gun in the last five years

    Twenty-percent of reporters are aware of veterans, and more than 30 percent have children-fetish issues, or support others who do..

  13. just read the survey and… please some one check this to make sure i am not wrong but….

    OMG – 77% of the people who did not carry in the last month answered that THEY DID NOT HAVE A CARRY PERMIT. Last time I checked 37 states still require a carry permit so they. so I am willing to bet a lot of the gun owners who answered this question do not carry daily because it would be illegal for them to do so.

    Here is the more interesting fact. Of the 328 of gun owners who answered this survey, owned a gun, and had a carry permit, 79% said they did carry daily. If any of there numbers are clos to correct, that would mean that with somewhere between 14.5 and 16.5 million carry permits there could be as many as 11 to million people are carrying a day.

      • I really hope some one will read the survey and confirm I have not misread it.

        If I have read the survey correctly this is a clear case of statistical manipulation to make it look like there is only a small wacky group of gun owners out there carrying rather than a growing number of responsible citizens taking responsibility for there own safety.

  14. only 18 percent of Americans with permits carry every day. That doesn’t seem right, does it?

    I think that’s feasible, at least in a state with a lot of permits. The more hoops you have to jump through to get the permit, the less likely those who don’t want to carry full time will go through the process to get the permit. In states with easy permits, hunters get permits to make hunting more convenient and don’t carry at all the other ten months of the year.

    In other words, I bet it’s less than 18 percent in Florida and more than 18 percent in California and Massachusetts.

    And I bet it’s really low in states that have easy/cheap permits and many difficult to avoid GFZs. Can’t carry in a restaurant, or within 1000 feet of a school or a house with a daycare license? Might as well not carry at all, unless you think today is the day you’re going to need it.

  15. I’ve never had a kitchen fire but I’m in no hurry to get rid of my fire extinguishers.

    The price of preparedness is low. The cost of being unprepared is immeasurable.

  16. “… only 18 percent of Americans with permits carry every day. That doesn’t seem right, does it?”

    Who the hell knows? Concealed means concealed. I carry in church but I wouldn’t mention it to my pastor, even though he is a gun owner. It’s really nobody’s damned business.

    That “3 million” statistic is every bit as accurate as the stats you might read on how often married couples have sex. There’s really no way to prove when a survey respondent is lying.

  17. 16,300,000 permits
    149,965,266 adults, not in prison, not living in CA, CT, DC, DE, HI, MA, MD, NJ or NY.
    10.8% or roughly 1-in-10 adults have a permit where they shall be issued.

    The numbers would obviously be lower in victim disarmament states.

    • By September 2015, 378,642 people (one in every 14 adults) had a license to carry in Massachusetts. This number (and percentage) has probably increased a bit since then.

      MA is not as monolithic as you may think. While the requirements for issuance are state-mandated, the discretion (it’s a “may issue” state) lies with the chief LEOs of the cities and towns. Some of them are as anti as can be, but away from Boston and some other savage jurisdictions, some CLEOs are VERY pro-2A.

      The Irish Mafia that controls the state is one thing, but as the chief of one town on Cape Cod once confided to me, “You guys help us.”

      • The last statistics I saw say that there are only about 94,000 permits issued for the entire state of California with a population approaching 40 million. Obviously there are very few in some areas (for example only app. 220 in LA with a population of 10 million), but in others there are quite a few. There are about 6000 permits issued in my county of 180,000. On top of that, there is a State Assemblyman from Sacramento who is pissed that the Sacramento County Sheriff is “shall issue,” and is going out of his way to make it as expensive and difficult as possible to get CCWs. After the Ninth Circuit declared that there is no right to a CCW permit, the numbers may shrink because of future legislative fiat.

        • Is a permit required in CA to keep a gun in one’s home?

          In MA, an LTC or FID is required to keep a gun at home. So the comparison twixt CA and MA may be apples to oranges.

        • The only “permit” to buy a gun is a Firearm Safety Certificate. ($25 and a multiple choice 35 question test, 70% to pass). Theoretically one is supposed to keep one’s FSC current (they are good for five years), but really the only reason to do so is to buy more guns. There are no other requirements.

  18. Criminalizing the free exercise of a right in order to suppress or eliminate that right is a thing that out of control governments do. That is why the second amendment was included in the Bill of Rights. At one time or another, carrying a concealed weapon was criminalized in every state in the Union, except one. Yaaa Vermont! Exercising the right to bear arms has been discouraged in this country through the imposition of draconian criminal penalties, for a very long time. This legacy must be overcome through reform of the law which, over time, will lead to a change in our fellow citizens attitudes. This will increase the number of citizens who carry daily.

    Or, a dramatic increase in the severity and frequency of the threats we face every day. That would also increase the number of citizens who carry daily.

  19. Make a National carry day? National bring your gun to work day? National self defense pride day. As if government or “official pc culture” actually approved of supporting such.

    You could have shops giving out freebies to people carrying! Discounts, make it a respectable thing! As it is, places like Krispy Kreme and comicon are afraid of people or kids having costume fake weapons…

    Thus the guns stay concealed, and no one knows. I bet many friends/family/acquaintances would be surprised to even know I have a gun let alone have carried it around them.

  20. National Reciprocity…………………………………………….end all gun laws so every good person carries and bad guys are scared to death far less crime after all the bad guys get shot and the gene pool gets lots of chlorine and if crazy liberal berntards Killarytards stopped shooting people!!

    • Yeah well, even when there were no restrictions on concealed carry, there were plenty of bad guys, and plenty of people who did not own guns or carry. There has always been and will always be crime and criminals.

  21. I would carry every day…. IF I was not federally barred from doing so. Working/living on an AF base has its benefits, but also drawbacks. Also where we are it’s a national forest, I have seen Bears, bobcats and coyote’s on most hikes… A knife is a better than nothing, but still :(.

  22. Two things are required to increase the number of people carrying a firearm:
    1. More publicity on defensive gun uses. There are many defensive gun uses that occur every day, (even at the lowest estimate -more than 100 per day). People change behavior if they see utility in the change.

    2. Ferociously support National Reciprocity and local “Shall Issue” efforts. Politicians count votes. They employee minions simply to register how many voters want Gun Control, and how many don’t, (they just record counts, not any of the reasoning). Diane Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi will support their perceived majorities regardless of their party agendas. They can do nothing if they are not in office.

    When is the last time you called a Senator or Congressman? We need to call every day.

  23. If you have a permit to carry, it is your responsibility to carry. All the time! Not just for yourself but for your community, friends, and family. The unarmed sheep put everybody’s lives at risk, not just their own because the rest of us are less safe when weaklings allow criminals to flourish. I would go as far to say that mandatory carry for law-abiding citizens is a must: the police cannot go it alone.

  24. How about making it a Federal, or state, law that big $ lawsuits opened with Bloomberg/Soros money are illegal if the firearm is used in self defense and is in accordance with the criminal code. A lot of people have a dread fear of using a carried firearm and being sued into poverty. Sure you didn’t go to jail but now your family is destitute. And if you are sued anyway, your legal fees are paid by the organization(usually not an individual)that sued you, and you are compensated for your time and mental anguish.

  25. First of all, I estimate that about 50% of all concealed carry licensees carry every day (more or less). Perhaps it is a low as 33% (1/3rd). I believe the 18% number is too low.

    Keep in mind that the 18% number could be accurate if gun-grabbers counted EVERY ADULT in constitutional carry states as concealed carriers.

    What will get more people to carry? First and foremost: normalization. The more people who carry on a daily basis, the more likely your mild-mannered Joe and Jane Citizen are to consider it.

  26. The number one reason I don’t carry more than occasionally is that I’m in the Marine Corps and I can’t carry on base where I work, or any base for that matter. Fix that and I’ll carry pretty much everyday. As will I’m sure at least another hundred thousand of my fellow service members. Honestly 100,000 is probably a pretty low number.

  27. I learned to carry open when I was a seventeen years old Marine,had access to all kinds of weapons I find I can carry now without a thought.

  28. They need to see you carrying. Over the years, that has been the most effecive way to influence others, passively and actively, to also carry. IMHO, no other individual method reaches as many people daily as simple going about regular life openly armed. Even most of those who were initially hesitant, of which I was aware, eventually were influenced to carry more often. Daily open carry encourages friend and stranger to be armed.

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