AP Photo/Lisa Marie Pane

Patriot Brief

• Nearly half of Americans now live in states with constitutional carry laws.

• Crime rates continue falling despite expanded permitless carry nationwide.

• Anti-gun predictions of chaos repeatedly collapse under real-world data.

The most telling number in the latest Crime Prevention Research Center report isn’t political — it’s practical. Nearly 47 percent of Americans now live in constitutional carry states, and the sky stubbornly refuses to fall. No wave of mayhem. No daily gunfights. No collapse of civil order. Instead, violent crime continues to trend downward.

That reality creates a serious problem for the gun-control narrative. If permitless carry truly produced more violence, the data would already reflect it. Instead, homicide rates are falling toward historic lows, not spiking upward. The correlation anti-gunners have promised for decades simply isn’t there.

Critics love to argue that constitutional carry “endangers communities,” but they never explain why those same communities aren’t imploding. Criminals adapt quickly — and one adaptation appears to be increased caution when the odds of encountering an armed citizen rise. Deterrence works, whether activists like it or not.

The real frustration for gun-control advocates isn’t public safety — it’s losing control. Constitutional carry removes government permission slips from a fundamental right, and that offends people who believe rights must be managed by bureaucrats. But rights don’t exist for the comfort of regulators.

The data keeps confirming what gun owners have said for years: freedom doesn’t cause violence. Criminal behavior does.

From Bearing Arms:

Constitutional carry shouldn’t be a controversial topic. It’s just how it should be. The idea that we need permission from the government to bear arms is what should be controversial.

And yet, here we are. The idea of constitutional carry is still too much for some people to comprehend.

However, most states in the nation have some form of permitless carry on the books. Sure, some of them are states that are large in land mass but small in population.

Even so, nearly 47% of Americans live somewhere where they don’t need a permit to carry a firearm.

A new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) on concealed carry in the U.S. reveals that 46.8 percent of Americans now live in “Constitutional Carry” states—there are 29 of them—where no license or permit is required, while Congress is mulling H.R. 38, the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, and anti-gunners are in a panic.

The report was prepared by John R. Lott, CPRC founder and CEO; Carlisle E. Moody, College of William & Mary – Department of Economics and CPRC associate, and Rujun Wang.

Now, the rest of the piece gets into what this means regarding national reciprocity and debunks The Trace’s article on the same subject.

However, I want to focus on this particular number, because I have thoughts. The short version?

Oh yeah. We need to pump them up…by a lot.

However, it’s not unexpected that more than half of the states would be constitutional carry, while less than half of the people live in those states. The population of both Dakotas and Wyoming combined, for example, is about a quarter of the population of New York City alone. There are going to be some population discrepancies.

This, of course, is a problem for the usual suspects, who seem to believe that constitutional carry is an open invitation to mayhem.

I’d like to point out, though, that while constitutional carry has increased and now nearly half of all Americans live in states where that’s the law of the land, the violent crime rate is dropping. If the outcome of more guns was, in fact, more crime, as anti-gunners attest, then why hasn’t that panned out? We should be seeing gunfights every day, and we don’t. We’re seeing the homicide rates and mass murder numbers decline;  not just to pre-pandemic levels, but likely to the lowest levels ever recorded by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Because of this, I’d wager that if we raised the number of Americans living in constitutional carry states by passing more laws allowing it, we’d see an even more significant decline in violent crime.

It’s almost like the criminals know that there are a lot more good guys with guns walking around, ready to take them out if they start trying to get rowdy. You know, like we’ve been saying would happen for years and years now.

Of course, if there’s one thing anti-gunners are good at, it’s ignoring inconvenient evidence and just pretending it doesn’t exist. They will, no doubt, be along any time now to tell us how constitutional carry is actually terrible and we’re all just a hair’s breadth away from total destruction of our country because some dude is walking around with a handgun concealed without begging the crown for permission first.

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