When the Bruen decision came down and destroyed the whole “may issue” thing, the usual suspects lost their ever-loving minds. This, they claimed, would make our communities less safe. More guns being carried concealed would lead to minor disputes escalating into gunfights, they claimed.
A couple of years later, and we’ve seen the single largest decline in the homicide rate in history, which kind of tells you just how full of it they were. While I’d love to chalk it all up to more guns on the streets deterring criminals, I’m not going to go down that road when I’m typically the guy who smacks anti-gunners down for doing similarly.
But we also need to remember that these formerly may-issue states also enacted what we’ve termed as “carry killer” laws, which make it extremely difficult for anyone to actually carry a firearm lawfully and actually do anything. Sure, you can get a permit if you want one and aren’t disqualified via objective standards, but you can’t do anything with it.
And that has always been a wrongheaded approach.
Why? Because concealed carry permit holders are among the most law-abiding people in the nation.
People with concealed carry permits are among the most law-abiding groups in the United States. Police officers have crime rates far below the general population. People with concealed carry permits are more law-abiding than police officers.
The arrest rate for the overall adult population in the USA is about 2,100 – 2,200 per 100k in recent years. The arrest rate for police officers has been about 170 per 100k. This may be low because no one officially tracks police arrests. Officials may be reluctant to charge police officers. The conviction rate for concealed permit holders is about 17.6 per 100k in Texas, according to an academic paper by John Lott, Moody, and Wang published in 2025. From the paper:
Of the 43,932 total convictions in the Texas DPS 2023 report, only 284 — or 0.6 percent — were convictions of LTC holders, a conviction rate of 17.6 per 100,000.
Convictions are not the same as arrests. Arrests for felonies tend to result in about 65% convictions. Arrests for misdemeanors result in about 45% convictions. A conviction rate is likely to be about half of the arrest rate. If we double the conviction rate to approximate the arrest rate, concealed permit holders have less than one-fifth the arrest rate of police officers. Concealed carry permit holders have an arrest rate 1.7% lower than the general population.
Now, let’s think about this for a moment.
Congress passed laws that allow police officers and retired officers to carry in all 50 states without a permit. They can carry in places where you and I are forbidden to carry because of their profession. They are exempt from numerous gun control laws, including some that allow them to personally own firearms forbidden to the general public, and they’re five times more likely to be arrested for a crime than someone with a concealed carry permit.
Moreover, this isn’t new. This has been the case for decades, even before the Bruen decision opened the door for more concealed carry in anti-gun states. In theory, if the “may issue” permitting was a good thing, we should have seen some inversion of that, and again, we don’t.
All the hysteria over any restoration of our rights is always framed as something that will make the entire community less safe, but how is that the case when the best metric we have for lawful gun ownership–concealed carry permit holders–suggests that the people who enforce our laws are more likely to break them than the average concealed carrier?
It’s absolutely insane, but the truth is that no matter how you cut it, lawful gun owners are not now, nor have ever been, the issue.
It’s well past time for this to be acknowledged and acknowledged publicly so that we can get past the absolutely insane concept that we need to keep restricting what we do so that the criminals will somehow stop being criminals.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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