Dr. John Lott - Does more concealed carry make America safer?

A new survey finds that nearly 30% of likely voters now carry a concealed handgun at least occasionally, with participation rising across demographic groups and states. As concealed carry becomes more common, what impact is it having on crime, personal safety, and self-defense?

John Lott is an economist, founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, and a nationally recognized expert on guns and crime. He joins the show to discuss new concealed carry data, trends in firearm ownership, and the debate over whether more law-abiding citizens carrying firearms makes communities safer.

Transcript

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Welcome back to the Lars Larson Show. It's a pleasure to be with you. I'm glad to get your phone calls and emails. And I will tell you something. If I have a dog in the fight on this next subject, it's a fact that I own guns. I've owned guns most of my life. I've owned guns all of my adult life. I even owned guns when I was a kid, which in most states you can't anymore, but uh it was a good thing at the time. Uh and now we've got an awful lot of Americans who are licensed to concealed carry. And I have concealed carry licenses for a few different states. I don't happen to live in one of the constitutional carry states, although eventually I would hope that all 50 of the states, 58 if you're an Obama voter, would be constitutional carry states. But in those states where people are allowed to have a license to carry concealed and they need the license, there are an awful lot of people who are carrying concealed. And Dr. John Lott knows all the numbers. He's an economist and a world-recognized expert on guns and crime and founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center. Dr. Lott, welcome back. Well, great to talk to you. Thanks for having me on. Have you noticed a fairly major rise in the number of Americans who now carry on a regular basis? Yeah, well, we just did a survey. McLaughlin and Associates did a survey for us because you know one of the issues is we know how many people have concealed carry permits. It's about 21 million Americans across the country. But as you mentioned, there are 29 constitutional carry states where it's not necessary for people to carry. And so we wanted to try to get a handle on how many people are are actually carrying in in those states in particular. And what we found is that our survey just looked at general election voters. General election voters, about 20% of them across the country, have a concealed carry permit. That's much higher. That's about twice the rate actually of nonvoters. But uh what you find is that uh for constitutional carry states, there's about 34% of adults say they carry at least some of the time. Uh about half of those say that they carry all or most of the time, and uh other half say sometimes or rarely. Uh and overall, the rate that people are carrying is higher. I mean, across all the countries, uh all the states, when you're looking at uh constitutional carry, people have a permit or not, you're talking about almost 30 percent of adults that are carrying, and uh for the general election voters, and uh uh that's up about five percentage points from what our survey showed two years ago. Now, John, uh I've Dr. John Lott is is my guest, and he serves as the founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center. I serve uncompensated on the board of directors of that center, so I have a dog in the fight. But tell me this: what does that tell you? I know that most of the time as an economist, you focus just on the numbers and the data, but what does it tell you about about what Americans are doing and what they are responding to that so many of them are carrying on a regular basis? Well, I think we saw a major change uh around COVID. Uh I think uh when COVID happened, uh you had about half the states actually stop for some period of time issuing permits. At the time, uh a lot of people were very concerned about the surge in violent crime that we had uh at that time. And so there was pressure on the states that said, look, if you're not gonna go and give out permits when people need these, uh, you know, you have to let us carry without uh having to go through a permitting process. And I saw I think a lot of the move in the states the last four or five years has been because of the reaction that you had to COVID. But uh, you know, there basically been two big beneficiaries of this change. One has been uh women, for example, who may be stalked or threatened. You know, you go across the states, it may take 45 days or 60 days or 90 days to go and get the permit. If a woman's being stalked or threatened, she may not have 90 days or even 45 days uh to wait. She may need protection right away, and constitutional carry uh allows her to have that. The other group per people that seem to have benefited a lot are people who are relatively poor. Uh I was just talking to a woman the other day who, uh single mom, uh had lived in a dangerous part of town, was trying to put herself through law school, so she had like almost no money coming in, and uh uh she couldn't afford uh the cost of a permit. And so she lives in Utah and it's a constitutional carry state. And when she faced uh multiple threats over time, uh she was able to go and protect herself and her young daughter uh with the with a gun that she was able to legally carry because of constitutional carry. So I think those have been some of the reasons why we've been seeing the change. But the other big thing is just during the Biden administration, we had the largest percentage increase in total violent crime that we've ever seen since the Bureau of Justice statistics started recording the numbers. Over those four years, there was a 59% increase in overall violent crime. Uh I think this last year uh we saw a big drop. Uh, and those numbers will become clearer in September. But murder is one thing that we already have a pretty good handle on, and it looks like we have the lowest recorded murder rate last year that we've ever recorded. The lowest previous, and they've been recording murder data since 1900. So it's like 126 years that we have this data. And uh the lowest previous murder rate that we'd recorded over those 126 years was 4.5 per 100,000. And and it looks like this last year went down below 4 per 100,000. So at the same time, we have this huge increase in the number of people who are carrying. We're gonna, I believe, see uh a record low murder rate and very huge drops in other violent crime categories. Hey, John, I I'm up against the clock, but uh very quickly, can you describe the results you got for black Americans who are 11% of likely voters? But when it comes to carrying a concealed weapon legally, what do they amount to? Right. So both black and Hispanics uh are overrepresented as far as their share of uh those who carry. Uh they make up 11% of likely voters, but about 16% of all those who carry all or most of the time. Uh it's even more lopsided for Hispanics. They also make about 11% of likely voters, but they make up about 19% of those who carry all or most of the time. Yeah, and that's that's actually very, very refreshing. That's Dr. John Lott. Dr. Lott, thank you very much. 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