Amid the push for national concealed carry reciprocity legislation, gun control opponents continue to insist that concealed carrying has no public safety benefits and that lawfully armed civilians simply escalate the risk to first responders and others nearby. Brady United on carrying in public places, for instance, claims that “[f]irearms are rarely used successfully in self-defense… When a firearm is present, a situation that could have been diffused may instead end in injury or death.” Concealed carry reciprocity “would only add fuel to the gun violence epidemic by allowing visitors from other states, and non-residents to carry without a permit within their borders. This is just one step closer to the Trump administration’s vision of America where guns are everywhere.”
This distorted view of public safety conveniently ignores the facts that criminals have always had their own version of “permitless” concealed carry and tend to be the ones most likely bent on inflicting injury or death on members of the public going about their legitimate business.
Contrary to claims that guns are “rarely used successfully in self-defense,” a study published in 1995 by criminology professor Gary Kleck concluded that “each year in the U.S. there are about 2.2 to 2.5 million DGUs of all types by civilians against humans.” The NRA’s “Armed Citizen” has tracked the scores of instances in which armed civilians save lives; likewise, Dr. John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) website lists at least 328 documented instances in just 2024 in which a person lawfully carrying defended themselves or others from a criminal attack.
The CPRC has now released new data examining “active shooting” incidents (as defined by the FBI) in the United States over a ten-year period starting in 2014, and in particular, how concealed handgun permit holders respond in these situations. The CPRC compared outcomes in the armed civilian cases with how law enforcement performed and offers many valuable conclusions. Armed civilians were less likely than police officers to accidentally cause harm to bystanders, and there were no cases in which the civilian responder interfered with the law enforcement response.
The CPRC examined the 180 active shooting cases in the study period in which a concealed handgun permit holder stopped an active shooting attack. (An Excel document with the details of each case is included in the CPRC article link.)
Out of the 180 incidents, there was only one case each (0.56%) of a concealed handgun permit holder accidentally shooting a bystander or having their handgun taken away. Although there were two cases (1.1%) in which where the permit-holder was killed, it was much more likely for the permit holder to be injured in saving the lives of others (44 cases, or 24%). There were no instances where the permit holder “got in the way of police.” Most significantly, the CPRC maintains that there were 58 cases “where a mass public shooting was likely prevented” by the permit holder.
In contrast, police officers shot and killed the wrong person in four cases (two in which another officer was accidentally shot, and two involving innocent bystanders), meaning the rate at which police accidentally shoot bystanders is over twice the rate at which armed civilians cause such harm (1.14% versus 0.56%). Police officers were also “much more likely to lose their lives or be wounded in stopping these attacks than armed civilians.” Officers were shot and wounded in just over 28% of the cases and killed in almost 8% of the cases. The rate at which police officers were killed was 5.94 times greater than the rate for permit holders.
The CPRC also found that armed civilians with concealed handgun permits appeared to be more effective, overall, at stopping an active shooting event. Such civilians “stopped 51.5% of the active shootings in non-gun-free zones, [while] police stopped 44.6% of the cases (124 arrested or killed by police, 32 committed suicide when police arrived = 156/350 = 44.57%).” The CPRC offers no explanations for this, but one possible reason may be that the armed civilian is more likely to already be on the scene than the summoned first responders, with a grasp of the danger as it unfolded.
These figures show that concealed handgun permittees at an active shooting incident pose less of a risk to bystanders and responding officers than do the professional law enforcement personnel on the scene and are less likely to be themselves killed or injured.
This confirms, in a different way, the contribution of concealed carry permit holders to general public safety. The CPRC has previously released its annual report on concealed carry permit holders across the United States. One of the consistent findings across the years has been that it is very rare for permit holders to violate the law – as a class, these individuals are even more law-abiding than the police. The report for 2024 observes that “it is impossible to think of any other group in the US that is anywhere near as law-abiding.”
According to the CPRC, there are now over 21 million concealed carry permit holders in the United States. In 16 states, more than ten percent of adults have a carry permit (Indiana has the highest concealed carry rate, at 23.1%). At the same time, the momentum for permitless carry continues, with 29 states currently recognizing the right of those who are legally eligible to possess firearms to carry a concealed handgun for self-protection without the need for a separate government permit.
Since 2007, the percentage of adults with carry permits has increased by about threefold. This exponential growth in permits and permitless carry coincides with “a general linear decline in rates of violent crime offenses. Violent crime fell from 4.77 per 10 million people in 2007 to 3.64 per 10 million people in 2023, a 24% drop.” The rise in lawful concealed carrying alone isn’t likely to be responsible, given the complexity of what drives changes in crime rates, but at the very least this shows there’s no “obvious positive relationship between permits and crime.” Additional details and studies are available in the CPRC’s amicus brief filed with the United States Supreme Court in the NYSRPA v. Bruen case.
The brief points out that the “debate surrounding the Second Amendment sometimes includes a simplistic, false dichotomy which can be summarized as: Guns versus safety.” The opposition to national public carry laws frames this as expanded public carry has no public safety benefits and will only intensify violent crime. Citizens, so the rhetoric goes, may have either guns or safety, but not both. If the gun control doomsayers were right about law-abiding citizens carrying in public allegedly fueling “the gun violence epidemic,” Baltimore, where lawful carry was until recently all but impossible, should have been the safest place in America.
Sensible Americans, now as ever, will continue to exercise their Second Amendment rights, secure in the knowledge that should they be faced with dangerous conduct and direct attacks on themselves or others, they will be both ready and able to respond appropriately.
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