Thanks for posting that! Very topical: I'm in an email...er, discussion with a friend in Northern California who is--surprise!--very anti-carry. I thought this note in the article was also interesting in that regard:
"These numbers are particularly topical given that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear the concealed carry case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association V. Corlett in November," the study states. "That case will determine whether those requesting permits need to provide a ‘proper cause’ for obtaining a permit. The eight states with that rule have issued permits to only 1.24% of their adult population. If the "proper cause" regulation were to be overturned, the study suggests that 2.3 million more permits could be issued in the affected states.
Six states now have over 1 million permit holders: Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Florida is the first state to have over 2.5 million permits.
Florida is the state that has issued the most concealed carry permits at 2.52 million, followed by Texas with 1.71 million and Pennsylvania with 1.49 million.
Table 2 from the paper lists, by state, the
percentage of the adult population with a concealed carry permit. What's a little shocking and disappointing to me is that
Texas comes in at number 29 out of 51 (District of Columbia is included). Of the 28 states that are ahead of Texas in percentage of licensees, 9 do not require a permit to carry within the state. Texas shows 7.81%. The top 5 states: Alabama, 32.06%; Indiana, 21.57%; Iowa, 16.54%; Georgia, 15.43%; and Pennsylvania, 14.35%.
Evidently 14 states, with 9.2 million license holders among them, reported license data by gender. Women averaged 28.3% of all license holders in those states, only a modest increase from 2020. We definitely have more work to do there, also. The numbers will always likely skew toward males, but in 2021 it's hard to fathom that female license holders number less than 39.5% of their male counterparts. Tennessee and Oklahoma seem to have the highest percentages of women permit holders with 34.6% and 33.1% respectively. Texas is at 29.2%.
Another highlight from the paper:
"Even given the low conviction rate for police, concealed carry permit holders are even more law-abiding than police.... Of the 26,304 total convictions in the Texas DPS 2020 report, only 114 — or 0.43 percent — were convictions of LTC holders, a conviction rate of 6.7 per 100,000. For Texas, permit revocations for firearms related violations amounted to 21 or 0.0012% of permit holders."