A newly-released report suggests that concealed carry permit holders are the most law-abiding citizens in the U.S.
The report, written by Crime Prevention Research Center president John Lott, notes that it is “very rare for permit holders to violate the law” and compares the crimes committed by permit holders to police officers and the general population. The police committed 103 crimes per 100,000 officers, while the general population committed 3,813 per 100,000 people, 37 times as much as the police crime rate.
And yet, the same metric shows an even lower crime rate for permit holders.
“Combining the data for Florida and Texas data, we find that permit holders are convicted of misdemeanors and felonies at less than a sixth the rate for police officers,” Lott writes. “Among police, firearms violations occur at a rate of 16.5 per 100,000 officers. Among permit holders in Florida and Texas, the rate is only 2.4 per 100,000.10 That is just 1/7th of the rate for police officers. But there’s no need to focus on Texas and Florida — the data are similar in other states.”
The report found that while concealed carry-permits have surged since 1999, the murder rates have declined:
According to the report, the permit holder total surged by 190 percent from 2007-2015, and in that same time period violent crime declined by 18 percent, as well as murder rates by 16 percent. Additionally, “25 states with the highest rates of permit-holding experienced markedly lower rates of murder and violent crime,” according to Lott.
States that allowed for concealed carry without permits had a 31 percent lower murder rate and 28 percent lower violent crime rate than “the seven jurisdictions with the lowest percentage of permit holders.”
The main takeaway from the report: concealed carry permit holders are the most law-abiding group in the country and are a deterrent to crime.
“The type of person that would go through the process, one in which you can often lose the license for fairly trivial offenses,” Lott told The Daily Signal. . “They are reluctant to use the the guns in a wrong way because they have a lot to lose if they do something wrong.”