Concealed Carry Permits at an All Time High

We recently reported that gun ownership is on the rise, and we’re pleased to report that the trend has not stopped. It has not even slowed but has accelerated. According to a new 62-page report published on September 27, by the Crime Prevention Research Center, the number of concealed carry permit cardholders is at an all-time high.

The abstract for the report reads, “The number of concealed handgun permits has increased for the third year in a row. The figure now stands at over 18.66 million – a 304% increase since 2007. It’s also an 8% increase over the number of permits we counted a year ago in 2018. Unlike gun ownership surveys that may be affected by people’s unwillingness to answer personal questions, concealed handgun permit data is the only really ‘hard data’ that we have. Sixteen states are missing from the data because people there don’t even need a permit to carry.”

The report was authored by John Lott, a veteran gun statistics researcher, and defender of the second amendment. Unlike his ideological opponents, Lott is interested in developing accurate information about the use of guns, gun ownership, and gun-related crime in the United States.

What his report shows is that the Left’s relentless efforts to shame gun owners and to entice politicians to revoke our second-amendment-protected right to self-preservation is backfiring.

Lott’s work illustrates a couple of things. For a start, it shows that the harder anti-gun advocates push their agenda, the more gun sales explode. This is long known, and we’ve demonstrated this by highlighting the particular spike in gun sales and in concealed carry permits triggered by Beto O’Rourke’s insistence that he will confiscate all AR-15’s and so-called “military-style weapons of war.” 

Kamala Harris recently said that she would confiscate as many as 18 million AR-15s, and as a consequence, gun sales went up again. In fact, in the same 16 states where concealed carry permits and gun sales went up most, gun shops had to close their doors until they could restock their shelves.

In the same way that the sensationalist way the mainstream media covers mass shootings makes subsequent mass shootings more likely to occur, anti-gun rhetoric triggers spikes in people exercising their second amendment rights. Our question then is, why- if fewer guns in the hands of Americans is what they are really after- do they do the exact things that spur people to buy more guns and for more mentally ill people to use them against unarmed crowds?   

If history is any indication, we know precisely where leftist policies lead. They lead to “mass” graves. There’s that word again.