The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has released the latest in its series of annual reports on trends in concealed carry permits in America.
The report, Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States: 2024 (Nov. 29, 2024), by Dr. John Lott, Jr,. Carlisle E. Moody, and Rujun Wang, looked at the trends accompanying the exponential growth in carry permits. Although the permit number peaked in 2022, the drop in the number of concealed carry permits in 2024 compared to 2023 was relatively small (less than 2%), with at least 21.46 million adult permit-holders currently in the United States.
This minor drop was attributed to the recent, sharp rise in the number of states – currently 29 – that allow constitutional carry, pursuant to which qualified adults may carry without a permit (and without the fees and government paperwork that a permit requires). There were only 13 constitutional carry states seven years ago, but thanks to the NRA and sustained guns rights advocacy (here and here, for example), the growth in constitutional carry since then has been nothing short of remarkable. Florida tipped the United States into a majority constitutional carry nation in 2023 when it became the twenty-sixth state to pass a constitutional carry law, followed by Nebraska (2023), and Louisiana and South Carolina this year. “[W]hile permits are increasing in the non-Constitutional Carry states, they fell in the Constitutional Carry ones even though more people are clearly carrying in those states,” the report noted.
Another very positive metric in the CPRC report is that now close to half of all Americans live in a constitutional carry jurisdiction: “46.8% of Americans (157.6 million) now live in Constitutional Carry States, with 67.7% of the land in the country (2.57 million square miles).”
Permits, though, remain popular. Overall, 8.2% of American adults have permits; outside of the restrictive states of California and New York, that rises to about 9.8% of adults. Indiana has the highest concentration of concealed carry permittees, at 23.1% of the population, followed by Alabama (20.5%) and Colorado (17.7%). More than 10% of adults have a carry permit in each of 16 states. In terms of raw numbers, Florida is the top state with 2.46 million in-state permit holders.
Another noteworthy trend is that in jurisdictions that record gender and/or race of permit holders, the percentage of permit holders who are women or minorities (or both) has increased significantly. In the seven states with data by gender available for both 2012 and 2023/2024, the number of permits increased by 255% for women compared to 120% for men. In the four states with records regarding race for 2015 and 2021/2023/2024, “the number of permits grew 283.9% faster for blacks than for whites. Permits for Asians grew 219.2% faster than whites.” In a further illustration of the impact of constitutional carry laws, the report pointed out that in Texas, “there was a noticeable drop in the percent of permits issued [to] women and blacks after Constitutional Carry was adopted. It appears that both groups were relatively sensitive to the cost of permits.” In contrast, the non-constitutional carry states of “Hawaii, Maryland, and New Jersey have dramatically increased the permit fees,” and California has doubled the amount of time of the mandatory training to qualify for a permit, to at least 16 hours. “These rules,” according to the report, “would eventually prevent poor minorities, the very people who benefit the most from owning guns, from having them.”
Significantly, the figure of 21.46 million permit-holders is “undoubtedly” an underestimate. Even without the individuals who opt to carry under constitutional carry laws and who can’t be accounted for using permitting information, the data on concealed carry permits is outdated in some jurisdictions or not readily available for a few states. For instance, Alabama simply doesn’t collect this data; New Hampshire only collects data on non-resident permits; and the New York State Police failed to fulfill the request for their concealed carry data. (The CPRC indicated that data for three states, Alabama, Georgia and New York State, was obtained by looking at NICS background checks for concealed handgun permits as a proxy for permitting information.)
On permit holders and crime, this year’s report again pointed out that permit-holders have been shown to be “extremely law-abiding,” even more law-abiding than police officers. CPRC reported: “Between June 30, 2023 and June 30, 2024, Florida revoked 2,006 concealed handgun permits for any reason, including misdemeanors or felonies. With over 2.46 million permit holders during this period, the rate was eight one hundredths of one percentage point.”
While the report recognized the relationship between concealed carry permit numbers and violent crime rates is complex, “[v]iolent crime fell from 4.77 per 10 million people in 2007 to 3.64 per 10 million people in 2023, a 24% drop,” which occurred over the same period in which the percentage of adults with permits soared by three-fold. Given that permit-holders are extremely unlikely to commit crimes, more permits clearly don’t correlate with increased crime.
Like permit numbers, gun sales are another reliable indicator of how Americans feel about their Second Amendment rights, and sales figures and demand remain at historical highs. An article in the Washington Examiner highlighted that this year’s “Black Friday” gun sales “were surprisingly strong, with some retailers reporting their best post-Thanksgiving sales day since the 2020 COVID-19 crisis.” FBI data showed “169,906 sales background checks on Friday and 613,380 during the week,” it continued. A post on Ammoland reported that November “continue[d] the trend of 63 consecutive months of more than 1 million firearms sales,” based on adjusted NICS figures from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). A manager at one of the nation’s biggest firearms stores observed to the Washington Examiner that in addition to Black Friday’s overall robust gun sales, his store “sold many big-ticket items — priced $2,000 and above. We also saw more people choosing to pay in full instead of taking advantage of our layaway program.”
The NSSF had earlier noted the significance of one more number that represented a “major shift since 2020,” being the dramatic rise in first-time gun owners as of 2024. A “population the size of Florida has become first-time, brand-new gun owners… more than 22.3 million people who previously had decided firearm ownership wasn’t for them looked around, decided they didn’t like what they were seeing, jumped off the fence and lawfully purchased a gun at retail.” These new owners, the NSSF predicted, could (and did) make a difference on Election Day.
All of these developments have occurred despite the Biden-Harris administration’s relentless use of every tool at its disposal to impose new gun control measures, shut down licensed and vetted gun dealers, attempt to remove legal protections from the firearm industry, and eviscerate the rights of responsible gun owners. Nonetheless, millions of Americans have persisted in exercising – and will continue to uphold – their Second Amendment rights, through lawful carrying, at the gun counter, and at the ballot box.
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