In 2023, gun control advocates predicted that Florida’s permitless carry law would make the state a more dangerous place.
Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a Giffords Florida senior advisor, declared “DeSantis just made Florida less safe.”
Everytown’s Shannon Watts called the new law a “dangerous policy,” while Moms Demand Action volunteer Gay Valimont (who’s now running for Congress as a Democrat in Florida’s 1st District) proclaimed the law “will immediately decrease public safety in our state” and “will blow the door right open for a staggering increase in gun violence.”
Instead, new data from Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health (hardly a bastion of pro-2A support) shows that gun-involved homicides dropped by 11% in Florida between 2015 and 2024. The report also found that the states with the lowest rate of gun-involved homicides include the permitless carry states of New Hampshire, Vermont, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and North Dakota.
Despite this data, the Center still maintains that “carrying guns in public places poses a serious threat to safety.”
Over the last four decades, states have weakened their public carry laws making it easier for people to carry a loaded gun in public places. As of March 2026, a permit is no longer required in 29 states to carry a concealed gun in public. Research shows that strong public carry permitting laws are associated with lower levels of gun violence.
For most of the past 40 years, homicides and violent crime have been decreasing across the United States, all while many states have made it easier to exercise our right to bear arms. Maryland, for instance, saw a four-fold increase in the number of carry permits after its “may issue” law was repealed after the Bruen decision, but it had the second-largest decline in gun-involved deaths of any state between 2019 and 2024.
You’d never know that homicides are falling to levels not seen in at least 65 years (and likely not for a century or more) if you relied on the Center’s report for that information. The anti-gun researchers at Michael Bloomberg’s pet project would never trumpet good news like that, especially since it contradicts their premise that more guns equals more crime.
The Center also blames the continued rise in suicides on guns, even though some of the states that have seen the biggest increase in suicide have some of the most restrictive gun laws in the country. Connecticut, for example, saw its female gun-involved death rate climb by 72% between 2019 and 2024, despite the fact that Connecticut has long had a “red flag” law in place that’s supposedly meant to prevent gun-involved suicides.
The growing number of suicides is something that absolutely needs to be addressed, but more gun laws aren’t the answer. I believe that voluntary safe storage options like the ones championed by groups like Hold My Guns are an important tool, as is removing the stigma around mental health treatment that groups like Walk the Talk America are doing.
Ultimately, suicide isn’t a gun issue. It’s a mental health issue. There’s no one strategy that can reduce the number of Americans taking their own lives, but any gun-centric approach is going to completely miss almost half of suicide victims.
In Florida, about 70% of gun-involved deaths were due to suicide, not homicide. Permitless carry clearly didn’t make the state a more dangerous place, despite the claims to the contrary from the Bloomberg-funded academics intent on criminalizing our right to keep and bear arms. Just as we don’t reduce violent crime by going after lawful gun owners, we won’t reduce suicides by treating gun ownership as the problem instead of addressing those factors that lead someone to want to take their life.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide or experiencing a mental health crisis, help is available. Call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline and connect with trained counselors. You can also visit 988lifeline.org for more information.
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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