Question of the Day: How Do We Get More Than 3m People to Carry a Gun Everyday?

“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?