THE INCREASINGLY DIVERSE ARMED AMERICA: Gun ownership patterns are changing for the better

Where did the small-penis bigotry about gun owners come from anyway? Was it psychological projection from those scared of guns?

Women and minorities are rapidly growing segments of the gun-owning public. These folks are also getting their carry licenses.

And it’s got gun grabbers running scared. They know Hillary is their last, best hope at reviving their gun control crusade…

Armed and Diverse

(National Review) –So much for the small-penis theory.

We’ve all heard that argument being made: “If you own a firearm,” the case runs, “it must be because you’re poorly endowed.” Guns, you see, are long and phallic — like portable, miniature Washington Monuments, there to be worn about the belt. In the 1960s, weak and diffident men would make up for their shortcomings by purchasing a Jaguar E-Type. Now they buy an AR-15. That must explain the buying spree of the last decade.

A related case is made in concert: That guns are being snapped up by “scared white men” who are terrified that their privilege is being diminished. Sure, firearms owners tell pollsters that their purchases were driven by general interest or by terrorism or by a desire to defend themselves. But progressives know better than that, natch; they know that the real reason is race or gender or the panoply of -isms. For years, white men have ruled the roost. But now women are doing better in college and the president is black. That must explain the surge.

It doesn’t, of course. In fact, neither theory explains anything much at all — except, perhaps, the paucity of the gun-control movement’s brief. Indeed, to look at the most recently available statistics is to learn that gun ownership — and, indeed, the “bearing of arms” in general — is an increasingly diverse, rather than monochrome, thing. Over the last few years, the United States has seen the stirrings of a pro–Second Amendment rainbow coalition, comprised of all sorts and popping up in all places. Penises? Penises don’t enter into it, matey.

As he does each year, John Lott Jr. has taken a good look at the government’s most recent concealed-carry numbers – and boy, are they interesting. As one might expect, concealed carry has grown dramatically in popularity over the last decade or so, and, as one might expect, that growth has coincided with a remarkable drop in crime. Between 2007 and 2015, Lott reports, the “murder rates fell from 5.6 to 4.7 (preliminary estimate) per 100,000,” while “violent crime fell by 18 percent.” Over the same period, “the percentage of adults with permits has soared by 190%.”

Well, then.

As for those “adults with permits” . . . well, they are most certainly not all old and white and male. On the contrary: Lott notes that in the “eight states where we have data by gender . . . since 2012 the number of permits has increased by 161% for women and by 85% for men.”

That has meant a dramatic leap in the share of carry-permit holders who are women, a figure that has increased by almost half in Tennessee and Texas and a third in Florida. Is it penis envy, perhaps?

A similar dynamic has developed within minority communities — at least, it has in the one state that keeps data by race. “Texas,” Lott records, “provides detailed information on both race and gender from 1996 through 2014.” And that information shows that

permitting has increased fastest for blacks, followed closely by Asians. While whites still hold the vast majority of permits, the number of black permit holders has grown more than twice as quickly as the number of white permit holders.

Moreover:

When permit data is broken down by race and gender, we find that rates of permit holding among American Indian, Asian, black, and white females all grew much faster than the rates for males in those racial groups. Concealed carry has increased most rapidly among black females. From 2000 to 2015, the rate of growth was 3.81 times faster than among white females.