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According to Texas State Rifle Association, the number of concealed handgun permits has increased for the third year in a row.
The figure now stands at more than 18.66 million – a 304-percent increase since 2007.
It’s also an eight-percent increase over the number of permits 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.
• Four states now have more than 1-million permit holders: Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Texas. Florida is the first state to have more than 2-million permits.
• Sixteen states have adopted constitutional carry, meaning a permit is no longer required.
Because of these constitutional carry states, the nationwide growth in permits does not paint a full picture of the overall increase in concealed carry.
But some residents still choose to obtain permits so they can carry in other states having reciprocity agreements.
• 7.3-percent of American adults have permits. Outside of the restrictive states of California and New York, about 8.75-percent of the adult population has a permit.
• In 13 states, more than 10-percent of adults have permits, down from just fifteen last year.
Arkansas, Oklahoma, and West Virginia fell below 10-percent, but they are now all Constitutional Carry states, meaning that people no longer need a permit to carry. South Carolina’s concealed carry rate has now risen to above 10-percent.
• Alabama has the highest concealed carry rate - 26.3-percent.
Indiana is second with 17.9-percent, and South Dakota – another Constitutional Carry state – saw its percentage decline to 16.02-percent.
• In 2019, women made up 26.5-percent of permit holders in the 12 states that provide data by gender. Eight states had data from 2012 to 2019, and permit numbers grew 101-percent faster for women than for men.
• Three states with detailed race and gender data for at least a decade show remarkably larger increases in permits for minorities compared to whites.
In Texas, black females saw a 3.6 times greater percentage increase in permits than white males.
North Carolina had black permits increase twice as fast as whites.
In Oklahoma, the increase for American Indians was twice the rate for whites and for blacks it was 66-percent greater than for whites.
• From 2012 to 2018, in the four states that provide data by race over that time period, the number of black people with permits increased almost 20-percent faster than the number of whites with permits.
Asians appear to be the group experiencing the largest increase in permitted concealed carry, growing 29-percent faster than whites.
Florida has issued 2.03 million, Texas is second with 1.4 million, third is Indiana with 1.33 million.
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