13% to 14% of Adults in Montenegro Licensed to Own a Gun, and Those Licenses Normally Allow People to Carry a Concealed Handgun, Possibly 11% can carry concealed, a higher rate than the United States.

About 68,000 citizens are legally armed in Montenegro, and the country has roughly 495,000 adults. That would put licensed gun ownership at approximately 13.7% of adults. According to UNODC/World Bank data, Montenegro’s most recent intentional homicide rate is about 1.3 per 100,000 people (2023 data). The average homicide rate in European countries for 2023 is significantly higher at 2.2 per 100,000 people.

Of permits issued in 2024, roughly 81% of those who with permits have possession-and-carry licenses while 19% have possession only licenses. (“In 2024, nearly 400 applications for possession-only licenses and more than 1,700 applications for possession-and-carry licenses were submitted.”) If that is representative of all the permits, it implies that 11.1% of adults in Montenegro would have a permit to carry. That compares to 7.8% of Americans have concealed handgun permits, though with Constitutional Carry the rate that Americans actually carry is much higher.

The carry rate in Montenegro is clearly much higher than what we know for the rest of Eastern Europe. Recent work we did for the Czech Republic, Estonia, and Lithuania showed that between about 2.5 and 3.7 percent of adults had permits to carry. Poland was only about 0.42%, but increasing quickly.