Last week, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) issued a new study on concealed carry that showed the number of permit holders has risen for the fourth consecutive year. CPRC puts the total number of concealed-carry permit holders at 16.3 million.
Leading the way in these rising rates are women and blacks. While few states track permits by gender or race, John R. Lott Jr., founder of CPRC and a renowned expert on guns and crime, showed that permits for these two groups are outpacing those for men and whites.
In 2016, women comprised 36 percent of permit holders in the 14 states that provide that data. From 2012 to 2016, eight of those states reported a 326 percent faster increase in permits among women than among men. In that same time period, for the five states reporting the data, the number of blacks with concealed-carry permits increased 30 percent faster than the number of whites with permits.
