How Many Folks Walk Around with Guns?

Doesn’t it seem like there’s a shooting which kills and injures scores of victims just about every day? Last week there was a shooting in a Walmart that killed six employees and wounded five more. The week before there was a shooting in Colorado Springs that left five dead and seventeen with wounds. A week before that, five people were gunned down in Maryland.

These were the big shootings. The day-to-day random gun violence which kills one here or wounds two there is also way up. But those ‘normal’ shootings are so frequent that they don’t even make the local news.

What’s going on? The Pandemic, which was blamed for the increase in gun violence in 2020 and 2021 is under control. The economic slowdown, which is always trotted out as an explanation for gun violence, is a narrative which simply can’t be taken seriously when the unemployment rate in most cities is under 4 percent.

On the other hand, there has been a significant increase in the number of individuals who have been given legal sanction to walk around with a gun, which we refer to as concealed-carry, or CCW (‘W’ meaning weapon.) Is there a connection between more people walking around with legally carried guns and the increase in gun violence over the last several years?