Florida Leads the U.S. in Concealed Firearm Permits, Texas Somehow Far Behind

Frontburner ^ | 13 December, 2012 | Bradford Pearson

[marktwain]

Florida is slated to become the first state with one million concealed firearm permits, Bloomberg reported yesterday. State officials issued 993,200 active permits as of Nov. 30, and are expected to pass the one million mark next week.

“Floridians have a great respect and appreciation for their Second Amendment rights,” said Adam Putnam, Florida’s commissioner of agriculture and consumer affairs.

This got me thinking about the Texas number. So I called the state department of public safety, and they sent me to their website (technology!). The numbers aren’t exactly apples-to-apples (the newest Texas numbers are for last year), but they still paint a picture where, despite all the Second Amendment bluster statewide, Texas actually trails Florida by a significant amount.

2011: 518,625 (total permits, statewide)

2010: 461,724

2009: 402,914

2008: 314,574

2007: 288,909

2006: 258,162

2005: 248,874

2004: 239,940

2003: 239,863

2002: 224,172

That 2003 to 2004 jump (only 77 new permits) seems suspect, but the others seem to jibe with the Florida growth trend of a near doubling of permits over four full years. Texas is actually fourth nationwide, behind Florida, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, according to the GAO.

I then checked this year’s applicants, by zip code, to see where they were from. The top 10:

77379 (Spring): 761 approved applicants

77573 (League City): 706

77429 (Cypress): 688

77584 (Pearland): 613

77346 (Humble): 551

75052 (Grand Prairie): 549

77546 (Friendswood): 532

77494 (Katy): 526

76028 (Burleson): 522

77095 (Houston): 520

Moral of the story? Stay out of the Houston suburbs.

[vette6387]

“I could walk into someones home and see .... a whole room full of rifles and not think twice about it.... but one pistol... and I get a little edgy... it’s wierd, I don’t know exactly why I think that way.”

But I thought that Texas was originally part of the “wild West” where the handgun hung on everyone’s hip! You don’t mean to tell us that Texan’s are “squimish” about pistols?

[TexasGunLover]

That’s so strange. Every Texan I know has many handguns and long guns. I have over 30 handguns myself.

Texas trails Florida because of the safe motorist act. People don’t think they need to carry on their person (they do), and it’s perfectly legal to carry in your car concealed w/o a permit.

[ansel12]

As I noted, things are probably different now because of the liberalization of the gun laws, but when I was growing up, people just didn’t get into pistols much.

Texas gun laws used to be very strict, and you could only carry one in the car if you were traveling, I think through two counties, so most people weren’t invested in shopping for, and investing in, or building a collection of pistols and holsters, like today.

My father kept a pistol, but it was always a game of avoiding the law seeing it during traffic stops.

My experience back then was that although there may be a dozen or more long guns and shotguns in the house, there might be a single pistol, people tended to budget for purpose driven guns, and pistols were low on the totem pole.