More than 8% of Americans have a permit to carry concealed despite an increasing number of states no longer requiring a permit to exercise such rights, otherwise known as constitutional carry, according to new a report from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC).
This marks the 11th consecutive year the report has been published, the latest iteration being authored by CPRC President John Lott, Professor Carlisle Moody and Rujun Wang. The authors found that 2024 was the second consecutive year in which there was a small decrease in permits—there was a total of 21.5 million permit holders, or 8.2% of America’s adult population.
But this is hardly the whole story.
“A major cause of the continuous decline is that 29 states now have Constitutional Carry laws after Louisiana allowed permitless carry, effective July 4, 2024,” the report states. “In other words, 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).”
As the report explains, because of the widespread acceptance of constitutional carry—a trend spurred by the NRA’s tireless advocacy for the right to carry—the 21.5 million number likely does not fully reflect the number of Americans legally carrying firearms for self-defense.
“Many residents still choose to obtain permits so that they can carry in other states that have reciprocity agreements, but while permits are increasing in the non-constitutional carry states, they fell in the four constitutional carry ones even though more people are clearly carrying in those states,” the report stated.
According to the report, more than 10% of adults in 16 states have carry permits, with Oregon falling out of that category in 2024. Indiana has the highest concealed-carry permit rate, at 23.1%, followed by Alabama (20.5%) and Colorado (17.7%). Five states—Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Texas—each have more than one million carry-permit holders. Alabama, which passed constitutional carry in 2023, fell below the one-million mark in 2024.
Also, according to the report, in 2024, women made up 29.1% of permit holders in the 14 states that provide data by gender. Seven states had data from 2012 to 2023/2024, and permit numbers in those states grew 111.9% faster for women than for men over that time period.
“From 2015 to 2021/2023/2024, in the four states that provide data by race over that time period, the number of Asian people with permits increased 219.2% faster than the number of whites with permits,” the report states. “Blacks appear to be the group that has experienced the largest increase in permitted concealed carry, growing 283.9% faster than whites.”
As the carry permit report shows, violent crime offenses have decreased as carry permit numbers have gone up.
“At the same time that there has been an exponential growth in permits, there has been a general linear decline in rates of violent crime offenses,” the report states. “Violent crime fell from 4.77 per 10 million people in 2007 to 3.64 per 10 million people in 2023, a 24% drop. Meanwhile, the percentage of adults with permits soared by threefold.”
According to the report, the increase in permits was relatively slow over the years, growing from roughly 2.7 million permit holders in 1999 to 4.6 million in 2007; however, the number of concealed handgun permits exploded during the Obama administration, with the Government Accountability Office estimating that there were at least 8 million concealed handgun permits in December 2011. By June 2014, that number had grown to 11.1 million. Now, 10 years later, the total stands at 21.5 million, which, as the report mentions, is undoubtedly an underestimate of the total number, due to outdated and missing data.
As NRA-ILA succinctly pointed out in a recent report on carry-permit trends and gun sales, “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 vetted and licensed 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.”
In addition to what we have reported here, the 73-page report is a treasure trove of pertinent information about concealed carry, ranging from an analysis of the extremely low percentage of permit holders convicted of crimes (less even than law-enforcement officers) to a breakdown of how “proper-cause” requirements for receiving a carry permit discriminate against women and Hispanics.
