When I began this blog 10 years ago, I had no idea that I would be talking about a new era of concealed carry in the United States. Shall issue was the thing.

By March of 2017, however, I was writing about “The Dawn of the Permitless Carry Era.” At the time, 10 states and Vermont allowed concealed carry without a permit. Two years later, in March 2019, when the number had grown by 4 states, I wrote about “The Continuing Expansion of Permitless Carry.”

At this point, I have been writing about “The Permitless Carry Era” as part of the overall history of concealed carry laws in the United States for a while.

In 2021, five states passed permitless carry laws (Utah, Montana, Iowa, Tennessee, and Texas), and already in 2022 another four states have (Ohio, Alabama, Indiana, and Georgia). With the total now at 24 states plus Vermont.

The animation below, continually updated by Jeff Dege of Radical Gun Nuttery!, is perhaps the best representation of the liberalization of gun carry laws in the US since 1986.

For the record, the previous four parts of this ongoing history are:

• Part 1: The Early Republic
• Part 2: The Restricted Era (1850s-1980s)
• Part 3: The Shall Issue Era (1986-2013)
• Part 4: Dawn of the Permitless Carry Era (2015- )

If you are interested in a concise and readable single-volume history of concealed carry laws in the US, please consider buying my book, Concealed Carry Revolution: Liberalizing the Right to Bear Arms in America.

As of April 12, 2022, 24 states have what reader Matthew Carberry calls “Alaska Carry” laws. The term refers to the fact that Alaska was the first state, in 2003, to adopt a system in which the government issues but does not require concealed carry permits. This means that anyone who can legally possess a gun can carry it concealed in public without a license (although various other restrictions on who, what, where, and when still apply).

There are a couple of reasons individuals in these Alaska Carry states might want to get permits. First, having a permit conveys the benefit of concealed carry reciprocity in other states. For example, 38 other states accept Alaska concealed carry permits.

Second, in some Alaska Carry states having a permit allows individuals broader discretion when carrying. For example, in early adopting Arizona, only those with concealed carry permits can carry in restaurants that serve alcohol and within 1,000 feet of a school.

The 24 Alaska Carry states and Vermont take their place alongside 16 states which are shall issue, making 41 of 50 states with liberalized concealed carry regimes. Only 9 states today remain may issue, though over a quarter of the US population lives in those 9 states.

Following a 2017 D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decision in Wrenn v. District of Columbia and Grace v. District of Columbia, the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department no longer requires applicants for concealed carry permits to provide a “good reason.” Although not a state, it is a shall issue jurisdiction.

Given the current division of American states into red and blue, we may see additional red states go from shall issue to permitless concealed carry regimes, but it is very unlikely that currently blue may issue states will become permitless carry.

At the same time, it seems there is no going back from liberalized gun carry laws, at least not yet. Since the rise of the shall issue era, no state has gone from a liberalized carry regime to a more restrictive one. That is, no permitless carry state has gone back to shall issue, and no shall issue state has gone back to may issue.

NOTES

*Initial law applied only to Idaho residents was expanded to include all U.S. citizens in 2020.

**Following a 2018 decision by the Arkansas Court of Appeals in Taff v. State (2018 Ark. App. 488), the NRA-ILA and other pro-gun rights organizations recognized Arkansas as an open carry state. As the sections of the Arkansas Code that cover concealed carry have not yet been amended, however, gun control organizations like the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence continue to classify Arkansas as a shall issue permitting state.

Of course I am not unique in observing this expanding right to bear arms. Over many years, Rob Vance has graphically depicted this and John Richardson has shared Vance’s graphic on his blog, No Lawyers Only Guns and Money.

The passage of permitless carry in New Hampshire and North Dakota has prompted the release of the latest graphic showing blue (permitless carry) continuing to grow and red (no permits issued) continuing to shrink.

UPDATE: As Jonathan notes in the comments, the graphic speaks to the issue of CONCEALED carry only, which of course has a complex relationship to OPEN carry, which is also a form of firearms carry right. Here in North Carolina, shall issue concealed carry was banned in 1879 then legalized again in 1995, but the right to open carry was reiterated during a legal challenge to the concealed carry ban back in 1882.

Note that the graphic depicts the % of the US population that lives in states covered by different laws. It does not speak to how many or what proportion of the population carries concealed or has a permit.

It is interesting to observe that the 13 states that have permitless carry are much less populous (9.7% of US pop) than the 6 states and DC classified as may issue (CA, DC, MD, MA, NJ, NY, RI) or no issue (Hawaii) (27.4% of US pop).

There are many nuances in the realities of concealed carry permitting, about which I will have a chapter in my book. But this graphic provides an excellent way of picturing the dramatic changes that have taken place in concealed carry laws over the past 30 years.

A very rough dating of various “eras” of concealed carry in the US looks like this:

• Unrestricted Era: Through 1820s
• Restricted Era: 1830s-1970s
• Shall-Issue Era: 1980-2014
• Permitless Carry Era: 2015-???

Briefly, in the early republic, no special licensing was required to bear arms, either openly or concealed.

But beginning with Kentucky in 1813, there was a movement in several southern states to ban the carrying of concealed weapons in public. In time, these prohibitions spread from the south to the rest of the United States. This “restricted era” of gun carry continued through the 1970s.

Over the last four decades there has been dramatic shift toward the liberalization of concealed carry laws in the form of state passage of what have come to be known as “shall issue” laws. From 1980 to 2013, 38 states passed these laws that require state or local authorities to issue a permit to any applicant that meets the objective statutory criteria if no statutory reasons for denial exist. The issuing authority’s discretion over subjective criteria like the “good moral character” or “good cause” of the applicant is removed from the process.

“Shall issue” laws now prevail in 40 of 50 states and only 9 states maintain more restrictive “may issue” laws: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.

Vermont has never banned the practice of carrying a concealed weapon without a permit and so does not issue concealed carry permits. Because of this, state laws that allow individuals to carry a concealed weapon in public without a permit are sometimes called “Vermont Carry.” Other terms for permitless carry are “freedom to carry” or “Constitutional Carry” (because “the Second Amendment is my carry permit”).

Whatever it is called, permitless carry represents the next phase of this liberalization of gun laws in the US. Including Vermont, 11 states now allow individuals to carry a concealed weapon in public without a permit, with certain restrictions and exceptions: Alaska, Arizona, Idaho (residents only), Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, West Virginia, and Wyoming (residents only).

In order of passage of permitless carry:

2003: Alaska

2010: Arizona

2011: Wyoming

2015: Kansas, Maine, Mississippi

2016: Idaho, Missouri, West Virginia

2017: New Hampshire

Other than Vermont, these 10 permitless carry states still issue concealed carry permits, which offer additional benefits depending on the state. For example, only permit holders in Arizona can carry concealed in businesses that service alcohol (provided the business allows firearms in the first place and the concealed carrier does not drink).

Concealed carry permits from permitless carry states also allow the permit holder to carry in others states that have reciprocity agreements with the issuing state. For example, an Alaska concealed carry permit is recognized by 38 other states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, West Virginia, Wisconsin, Wyoming.

EDIT (3/16/17): Reader Matthew Carberry makes an astute observation in a comment (below) that calling permitless carry in states which issue carry permits “Vermont Carry” is a misnomer. The modern system of “permitless carry with permit for reciprocity,” therefore, is more properly called “Alaska Carry.”

Although I am not a betting man, if I had to guess what Part 5 of this history of concealed weapon laws in the United States might be I would say national concealed carry reciprocity. That is, a concealed carry permit issued in any state would have to be recognized by every other state. There doesn’t seem to be enough political momentum to pass such a federal law right now, but there didn’t seem to be any movement for permitless concealed carry when I began blogging in 2012 either.

Although it was not one of his major points, I remember Givens talking about when he was a police officer in the 1970s. He said it was so common for people to carry guns in their cars, that when he pulled someone over he did not ask, “Do you have a gun in your car?” He asked, “Where is the gun in your car?”

Now, even prior to the shall issue concealed carry revolution, some states allowed people to carry concealed handguns in their cars without a permit (e.g., Louisiana). But one of the interesting things about the rise of shall issue concealed carry to me is that it allows some people to do legally something that they would otherwise do illegally.

In the book Under the Gun, James Wright and his colleagues report on a survey conducted by Cambridge Reports, Inc. in 1978 (pp. 142-43). The survey found that 29% of respondents who owned handguns responded “yes” to the question: “Do you ever carry that handgun or pistol outside of the house with you for protection or not?” If you add the respondents who said “not sure” (perhaps due to their not wanting to incriminate themselves), the total jumps to 42%. In other words, nearly half of handgun owners in 1978 may have carried their gun outside the house for protection.

Now, I don’t want to over interpret these findings, because some of those people were probably law enforcement officers or security guards, or carried the gun outside their house but on their property, or legally carried a gun in their car, or legally open carried (as they could in North Carolina, for example).

But certainly some of those 42% carried their guns illegally in public because they determined that not doing so was a greater threat to them than the potential criminal punishment for getting caught. Hence, “Where is the gun in your car?” And shall issue concealed carry gave some of these people a legal avenue for doing what they deemed necessary.

I was thinking about this during class recently, but in the opposite direction: taking something that people have been doing legally for some time and making it illegal. California’s impending (2017) total ban on gun magazines that hold more than 10 rounds will put thousands of law abiding gun owners there in a position of either surrendering/destroying their previously legally owned magazines, or becoming criminals.

It’s interesting to me to think about how laws can either de-criminalize or criminalize things people have been doing often for long periods of time. It is nice to be on “the right side of the law” with respect to concealed carry, but I would hate to wake up one day and find myself on “the wrong side of the law” when nothing about me or my behavior has changed.

(Note that in The Trace graphic below it says live-fire “training,” but few would characterize the range time spent in most required concealed carry classes as “training.” Really this refers to whether you have to fire a gun as part of the process.)

I have previously written about North Carolina’s concealed carry permit requirements and controversy over people obtaining Virginia non-resident permits (recognized by North Carolina) as a way of “skirting” the NC law. This concern animates Mascia’s Trace investigation, which is also an argument against recently proposed national reciprocity laws.

I have spent a good deal of time looking at the details of various state concealed carry laws — the devil is in the details, after all — and there is indeed a huge variation in what is required to get a permit, even just looking at shall-issue states.

The Trace article reminded me of an earlier news piece I had seen about getting a concealed carry permit in Washington State. The earliest state to go shall-issue — in 1961, well before the shall-issue revolution erupted in Florida in the 1980s — Washington is also one of the most liberal in terms of its concealed carry law.

For those who equate Washington State with the City of Seattle – the latter with its current reputation for Starbucks-drinking, REI-wearing, Microsoft-rich liberals – this would seem to be an unlikely location for the nation’s first shall-issue law. But the area’s transformation into the San Francisco of the Northwest is actually fairly recent. Even today, one need not go far outside of the city proper to find a robust gun culture. Then, as now, much of the state of Washington was very rural, with strong hunting traditions and not a little strain of libertarianism.

This was discovered by msnbc.com reporter Mike Stuckey when he was able to apply for and receive (a month later) a concealed pistol license from the Seattle Police Department in just 22 minutes despite never having fired a handgun before.

Another interesting part of this msnbc.com story, as you can see from the screen cap above, is that the author spent some time with the venerable gun trainer and legal expert Marty Hayes of the Firearms Academy of Seattle and the Armed Citizen Legal Defense Network, whose videoed thoughts are shared along with Stuckey’s text.

As I get back to the roots of my intellectual engagement with American gun culture — the rise of the concealed carry nation — I am going to look at the development of concealed carry laws in my adopted home state of North Carolina.

Although this development in North Carolina is not exactly the same as in every other state in the union, neither is it totally unique. It very much fits into the broader patterns of the history of concealed carry about which I have written previously, beginning with the early republic (up to 1850), followed by the restricted era (1850s to 1980s), and now with the rise of the shall-issue era (1990s to present).

In 1995, when North Carolina finally got swept up in the shall-issue wave started by Florida, it ended a continuous 116 year ban on the carrying of concealed weapons in public by ordinary citizens. Like most states, by the end of the 19th century North Carolina had banned concealed weapons. But unlike many southern states which passed bans in the early 1800s, North Carolina did not ban concealed weapons until the Reconstruction Era (though it had other gun control laws, especially against blacks).

1776 and 1868: Original and Revised Constitutions of North Carolina

The original Constitution of the State of North Carolina was adopted by the Fifth Provincial Congress on December 18, 1776 in Halifax. It was preceded by a 25 point “Declaration of Rights,” of which the 17th was:

“That the people have a right to bear arms, for the defence of the State; and, as standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up; and that the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”

This aspect of the state constitution remained unchanged through the Civil War. In 1867, the United States Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts which laid out the terms the former Confederate States needed to abide by in order to be re-admitted to the Union. Among these were the drafting of new state constitutions and passage of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (defending citizenship, due process, and equal protection).

North Carolina responded by holding a Constitutional Convention in 1868. 120 elected delegates – including 107 Republicans and 15 blacks – met in Raleigh to draft the new document, which was submitted for population ratification in April. Among its most important provisions were the abolition of slavery and removal of property and religious qualifications for voting, resulting in universal male suffrage including blacks.

The 1868 Constitution retained the original structure of beginning with a “Declaration of Rights,” which became Article I. According to the Journal of the Constitutional Convention, concerning the right to bear arms, the original report of the convention’s Standing Committee on Preamble and Bill of Rights proposed retaining the original language of the 17th point of the 1776 Declaration of Rights. When it was submitted for a third reading and final passage, Mr. John Washington Graham, of Hillsborough in Orange County, moved to amend the new Section 24 by striking out “the people have a right to bear arms for the defence of the State,” and inserting “a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

The amendment was adopted, and the report of the Committee on a Preamble and Bill of Rights as amended passed its third and final reading by a vote of 87 yeas to 20 nays.

Article I, § 24 of the North Carolina Constitution of 1868 thus read:

“A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; and, as standing armies, in time of peace, are dangerous to liberty, they ought not to be kept up, and the military should be kept under strict subordination to, and governed by, the civil power.”

Interestingly, J.W. Graham of Orange Country voted AGAINST Article I which contained his amendment on the right to bear arms. A lawyer by training (earning his LL.B in 1960 from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Graham became an officer in the Confederate Army and was wounded (shot through both legs) two weeks before General Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox in 1865. When he was elected as a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, he was a staunch opponent of Reconstruction and repeatedly voted in the minority against change with other members of the Conservative Party.

The job of the discussant is to read the papers being presented, offer some intelligent commentary on them, and raise some questions for the authors to consider.

After one paper (on mass shooting events was withdrawn), I was left to comment on three papers:

• “Examining Determinants of Race-Specific Gun Violence” by Rick Dierenfeldt, a doctoral student at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock

• “The Effect of Large-Capacity Magazines on the Casualty Counts in Mass Shootings” by Gary Kleck of Florida State University

• “The Point Blank Effect: A Preliminary Assessment of the Deterrent Effect of Firearm Possession and Use” by Vincent Ferraro of Framingham State University and Saran Ghatak of Keene State College.

Papers presented at conferences like this are typically unpublished and are often in their very early stages, therefore the three papers I read were in various stages of completion.

The most complete paper, and the one of most interest to readers of this blog, is Kleck’s on large-capacity magazines and mass shootings, so I am writing a separate post on that paper that will go up tomorrow.

“Examining Determinants of Race-Specific Gun Violence”

Dierenfeldt examined racial (black-white) differences in the likelihood of gun use during an aggravated assault using data from the National Incident Based Reporting System (NIBRS) from 2009-2011. (The NIBRS is replacing the summary reporting found in the Uniform Crime Reports [UCR] and includes more detailed information on criminal incidents reported to police.) He combined this crime data with demographic information found in the American Community Survey.

Using complex statistical methods, Dierenfeldt found some interesting similarities between the predictors of gun using during an aggravated assault for blacks and whites, and a couple of interesting differences.

• Notable SIMILARITIES are that both whites and blacks are MORE likely to use a gun when their victim is male and when their victim is black. Both races are LESS likely to use a gun when they live in the South and when alcohol use is involved.
• Notable DIFFERENCES include blacks being more likely to use guns when they are younger and whites more likely when they are older. Blacks are also more likely to use guns when their victim is younger, when the assault takes place in public rather than in a residence, and when they live in highly segregated communities.

This suggests that simply saying “gun use during an aggregated assault” is not sufficiently specific to understand its causes and therefore no single/simple public policy can be implemented to address it.

“The Point Blank Effect: A Preliminary Assessment of the Deterrent Effect of Firearm Possession and Use”

In their paper, very much a work in progress, Vincent Ferraro and Saran Ghatak wade into the perilous waters of the guns and crime debate, and if that alone were not enough, they do so with a particular focus on increasingly controversial “Stand Your Ground” laws.

Basically, Ferraro and Ghatak look at state level homicide rates (average number of murders per 100,000 population in 2011, 2012, and 2013 according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports) and try to determine whether state gun policies are related – positively or negatively – net of other predictors of homicide.

They focus on 3 state gun policies in particular:

1. Whether a state’s concealed carry law is shall issue/unrestricted vs. may issue
2. Whether a state has a Stand Your Ground law on the books, and
3. The percent of the state’s population that has a concealed carry permit (according to the 2014 Lott, Whitley, and Riley report).

Although the results here are very preliminary, on their first take Ferraro and Ghatak find the following statistically significant correlations:

• Positive relationship between Stand Your Ground law and homicides rates
• Negative relationship between percent of population with concealed carry permits and homicide rates
• Positive relationship between socioeconomic deprivation and homicide rates
• Positive relationship between percent non-Hispanic black in state and homicide rates

Shall issue licensing had no significant relationship with homicide rates, which is not surprising since 82% of the 49 states in the study are shall-issue (Vermont excluded because its lack of a licensing system). There is simply not enough variation in this “variable” for it to vary systematically with another variable.

Where you find more variation with respect to concealed carry is in the percentage of the population with a carry permit (mean for 49 states is 4.97 with a standard deviation of 3.17). Not every carry law is created equal, even beyond the shall issue/may issue divide. This was one of the points of the Lott, Whitley, and Riley report, and Ferraro and Ghatak’s study seems to bear out the importance of looking at the consequences of different specific details of different shall issue laws.

And in terms of the guns and crime debate (more guns, more crime or less?), only the percentage of the population with concealed carry licenses would seem to bear on the debate directly. More concealed carry licenses would mean more criminal deterrence and less crime – which is what the authors’ data shows. Shall issue vs. may issue and SYG laws are not actually measures of whether there are more guns or not.

Last, bearing in mind that correlation is not causation, I questioned the finding of a positive relationship between SYG laws and homicide rates. It seemed as plausible to me that a higher homicide rate would lead a state to pass SYG laws as the reverse (that SYG laws lead to higher homicide rates, which is what the authors argue).

And now, as of October 15, 2015, Maine becomes the 7th state to allow permitless carry. Which is significant, but we should also bear in mind that the seven permitless carry states are not exactly what we would call “populous.” This is evident in a very useful data visualization put together by Rob Vance and John Richardson. (I wrote about a previous version of this data visualization here.) As they note, “Every Picture Tells a Story.”

This graphic shows the core of the ongoing liberalization of gun carry in the United States is “shall issue,” coming at the expense of may issue and no issue. But the blue in this chart representing “unrestricted” (permitless) carry is becoming more than just a barely visible sliver. And that is worth noting and watching. Stay tuned for Vance and Richardson’s “Every Picture Tells a Story, Part Four.”

In my effort to document the shift in the core of American gun culture from hunting and target shooting to self-defense — i.e., from Gun Culture 1.0 to Gun Culture 2.0 — I have been accumulating one copy of the NRA’s American Rifleman for every year from the 1920s to today. The oldest issue I have so far is from December 1929.

Thumbing through this issue, a few things immediately stood out to me. The first three full advertisements are all for ammunition, and each highlights the successful use of particular brands of cartridges (Peters, Western Lubaloy, and Winchester Precision) in major target shooting competitions like Camp Perry and the International Police Pistol Team Championships. The fourth ad is for Colt’s revolvers and mentions their success in the United States Revolver Associations target shooting matches.

Of 32 total ads in the magazine that related to guns (excluding a great ad for Old Gold cigarettes, “change to OLD GOLD in kindness to your THROAT”!), only 1 mentioned the self-defense use of guns. In the ad shown below, Smith & Wesson boldly declares: “Self defense is the inalienable right of every man whether his aggressor is human or beast.” So, self-defense has always been a part of American gun culture, but not the major selling point until more recently. The ads surrounding the S&W ad below are more typical of the time. Note also that the S&W ad also references carrying your personal weapon “on your next hunting or fishing trip,” not “on your next trip to the grocery store.”

A second feature of the 1929 issue of American Rifleman that caught my eye was the NRA’s editorial, “Merry Christmas — and Gun Laws.” Hopefully you can click on the photo and it will appear large enough for you to read the entire text, which is fascinating. What is interesting to me is to read the editorial in light of the common characterization of the NRA as being a moderate, even pro-gun control organization in its early days (supporting “common sense” gun control measures), and only becoming a more hard line anti-gun control organization in the past 40 to 50 years.

The editorial begins by observing that December “may be the month for the friendly changes of gifts at Christmas time, but it is the month in which the shooter is likely to have handed to him a few gifts that he is not at all happy to receive, in the shape of restrictory firearms legislation.”

Among the forms of gun control the NRA opposed at the time: “We are unalterably opposed to any law requiring a main to obtain a permit in order to purchase a gun or to keep it in his home or place of business, and we are opposed to regulation requiring ‘mugging’ and finger-printing for honest citizens, the same as is done in the case of criminals.” Remember, this is not Wayne LaPierre or Charleton Heston speaking here.

Concerning one of my main interests, concealed carry, the NRA takes the following position: “We have no objection to legislation requiring a man to obtain a permit to carry a gun concealed, as long as proper provision is made in the law to enable any honest citizen who is a member of a properly organized target-shooting club to carry his gun to and from the target range. We do not believe that the necessity of a permit to carry concealed weapons will have any appreciable effect on the use of guns by criminals; but if the police believe that such a law will help them, we have no objection to its passage.”

Here the position of the NRA has changed since 1929, but perhaps in a more evolutionary than radical way that many presume. No mention is made here of the discretionary (i.e., discriminatory) nature of permitting at the time. The NRA perhaps assumed that any upstanding, law-abiding person would be able to get a concealed carry permit, something that the gun rights movement later came to see as false.

A second section of interest is “The Dope Bag.” In it, three experts answer questions submitted by readers. Lt. Col. Townsend Whelen handles rifles and big-game hunting, Capt. Charles Askins takes shoguns and field shooting, and Maj. J.S. Hatcher is responsible for pistols and revolvers. As can be seen in the photo below, American Rifleman describes this as a “free service to target, big game, and field shots.” Already this suggests that defensive shooting is not core to the issues addressed in this section of the magazine.

In the December 1929 issue, answers to 12 questions are given over 5 pages of 3 column text. Only one of these concerned the self-defense use of guns, and the response was quite brief. Hopefully the photo below is clear enough that you can read the text of the question and answer yourself. Of note is Maj. Hatcher’s preferring the greater “moral effect” of the .25 Automatic Colt to the .41 Derringer.

In the end, reading this 1929 issue of American Rifleman reinforces my sense that self-defense has always been a part of American gun culture, but it was nowhere near as central then as now. We have indeed seen a shift from Gun Culture 1.0 to Gun Culture 2.0.

Because the authors of this study had applicants’ home addresses on the permits applications submitted to the Seattle Police Department, they were able to connect characteristics of neighborhoods to the likelihood of permit applications. As noted in my previous post, one expected finding in this aspect of the study turned out not to be the case: there was no statistically significant relationship between rates of crime in neighborhoods and applications for permits (the so-called “crime threat” hypothesis).

Another line of inquiry concerns the “racial threat” hypothesis – the prediction that the more racial minorities there are in an area, the more members of racial majorities will seek to arms themselves. The authors test this hypothesis using three indicators of “assumed racial threat.”

First, they look at the proportion of nonwhite residents in an area in relation to concealed weapon permit applications. They find that, in fact, in more racially mixed areas the rate of permit application was higher than in predominantly white areas, which would seem to support the racial threat hypothesis. HOWEVER, they also report, “In the most racially mixed areas, gun applicant rates are not only higher, but they are twice as high for blacks as they are for whites, 20.2 per thousand for blacks versus 10.6 per thousand for whites” (p. 72). So, something other than whites being threatened by racial minorities is going on here. For the traditional “racial threat” hypothesis to work, then white residents would have to be even more threatened than black residents, which does not seem to be the case in general.

Second, the authors look at concealed weapon permit application rates in relation to the increasing proportion of black residents from 1960 to 1970. They find a strong correlation between the two: as the proportion of black residents increases, the rate of permit applications increases. However, they also find a similar pattern for black and other nonwhite applicants, again suggesting no simple racial threat.

Third, they look at the tempo of increase in black residents from 1960 to 1970. They find that “whites seek permission to carry a concealed weapon more frequently if they live in a racially changing area than if they live in a racially stable area” (p. 72). This is true even in areas that are racially stable and historically black. Black permit applicants, by contrast, have much higher rates in areas that are racially stable and historically black.

The difference in the behavior of white and black applicants here suggests an area in which the racial threat hypothesis could apply: it is not the presence or growth in the number of black residents, but the rate of growth in the number of black residents to which whites may be reacting.

The fact that most crime is intra-racial not inter-racial may help explain why the permit application rate for blacks is higher than for whites in all areas of Seattle, but is particularly high in the area the authors identify as Seattle’s ghetto. Rates of reported victimization on the permit applications are much higher for blacks than whites, and much higher in the ghetto area (39%) than in the predominantly white area (7%).

In the end, there seems to be two racial threats going on here: the racial threat perceived by whites in areas of Seattle that were rapidly becoming more racially diverse, and the actual threat experienced by blacks all over the city, especially in the area with the highest concentration of blacks.

This is in line with the idea that gun carrying by white men is more of a symbolic response to their perceptions of a changing social environment over which they have less control, while for black men and women it is a more practical response to their higher probability of actually being victimized.

The authors conclude by postulating “an inverse relationship between citizen gun-carrying behavior and the gun carrier’s perception of police effectiveness to control threatening events” (p. 74). This is one area in which more recent scholarship definitely applies. Jennifer Carlson’s work on gun-carrying in Detroit, Michigan highlights this, including her article, “’I Don’t Dial 911’: American Gun Politics and the Problem of Policing” and her forthcoming now-available book, Citizen-Protectors. Neither white nor black gun carriers trust the police much, but for very different reasons.