CPRC in the Christian Science Monitor: How law-abiding are concealed handgun permit holders

From the article in the Christian Science Monitor:

Arguments for concealed carry

“I don’t argue that there are no problems with [concealed-carry permit holders], but when you look at the data it’s pretty hard to find any other group in the population that’s as law-abiding as” permitted gun carriers, says John Lott Jr., an economist and gun-rights advocate and author of “More Guns, Less Crime.”

“The type of person who’s going to go through the process of getting a concealed-carry permit is not the kind of person you have to worry about,” he says. “They’re law-abiding citizens who have a lot to lose if they make a mistake.”

Statistics support Mr. Lott’s assertion. The number of incidents in which concealed-gun carriers kill innocent people is a fraction of 1 percent of all gun-related homicides. In North Carolina, one of only a handful of states that reveals the identities of permit holders, 200 of the 240,000 concealed carriers (.08 percent) committed felonies of all types, including eight shooting deaths, in the five-year period ending in 2011. This compares with about 2.5 percent of voting-age Americans who have a felony rap sheet, according to The Sentencing Project. . . . .

The national numbers show an even more dramatic comparison. Since the author was dealing with Florida, the CPRC had provided numbers for Florida showing that over the six years since 2008 firearm violations in Florida by concealed handgun permit holders was less than 1/10,000th of one percent and the vast majority of those were fairly trivial.