Law abiding gun owners
The number of Floridians with permission to pack heat has jumped nearly 50 percent in three years.
In 2005, one year before the state Legislature’s decision to provide anonymity to people holding concealed weapons licenses, there were 347,350 active permits statewide.
Now, that number has swelled to about 520,000.
Some states ask applicants why they want a concealed weapons license. Florida isn’t one of them. That makes it almost impossible to say who is getting licensed and why.
Sort of related is Who’s Packing Heat:
A pit bull lunges for a 4-year-old boy as he walks with his father to Saturday services at a Harrisburg synagogue. The father pulls his pistol and shoots the dog. In the parking lot of an Annville-Cleona school, a student finds a loaded handgun. Turns out, a school bus driver with a permit to carry it dropped it from her purse.
In the wake of a shooting outside Harrisburg Mall, police arrest and then release an armed man in a car. He’s not a suspect, they say, and he has a permit to pack that pistol. Recent stories like these point to a quiet revolution in American gun laws that began two decades ago, with Pennsylvania in the vanguard.
Wow. It’s like normal, every day people get carry permits or something.
September 22nd, 2008 at 9:00 am
Actually, 54,341 of those licenses are out-of-state… not sure if the SP Times took that into account. Not that it matters, because even if that 1:35 ratio remains constant, the state’s population grows at about 300k-400k per year. That still equals more normal, law-abiding citizens with concealed weapon permits.
Also, if you look at the statistics, you’ll see that there are generally surges in applications in the winter when a lot of the transient “snow birds” are here.
September 22nd, 2008 at 11:36 am
The other day I saw somebody’s shirt ride up over their holster in the middle of Somerville Mass. There were lots of people around, but I think I’m the only one who noticed. And here I thought in an artsy square in an Uber-liberal town right on the Cambridge boarder, that I surely was the only one carrying.
I gotta say, I read about a lot of dog attacks. People need to think about more than two-legged predators when considering a defensive firearm.
September 22nd, 2008 at 6:55 pm
The times would do whatever it could to scarify the statistic. I think the next time the daughter comes down I’ll run her through a CCW course. Maybe the son-in-law also. Gotta pump up those stats, heh.