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Imagine a single woman driving across state lines at night, hoping that her car won’t break down and become a crime victim. Or a truck driver as he travels across the country with valuable merchandise. They can quickly run into trouble in states such as California, Illinois, Maryland, New York, New Jersey, or Oregon, which are among the ten states that don’t recognize concealed handgun permits from other states. Similarly, nine states don’t grant or make it very difficult for non-residents to get permits.
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A bill before Congress would change that and let people who can legally carry a concealed handgun in their own state carry it across state lines.
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There are 21.5 million concealed handgun permit holders in the United States, and that isn’t counting people who carry in the 29 Constitutional Carry states where it is no longer necessary to have a permit.
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For most of the country, reciprocity, where people can carry their concealed handguns in other states, is already a fact of life. The average state allows people with concealed handgun permits from 30 other states to travel freely.
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Permit holders are extremely law-abiding, losing their licenses for firearm-related violations at rates of thousandths or tens of thousandths of one percentage point. Police rarely commit crimes, but concealed handgun permit holders are even more law-abiding, facing a conviction rate for firearms offenses that is just one-twelfth the rate of police.
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Opponents argue that national reciprocity could lead to confusion about which gun laws apply in a given state, leading to arrests – but reciprocity is common, and there is no evidence of a problem with out-of-state permit holders.
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They also worry that the standards for getting a permit vary across states, but there is no evidence that permit revocation rates are higher in states where it is easier to get a permit.
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Despite all the fears of gun control advocates, there is a reason that over 86% of police chiefs and sheriffs support national reciprocity. And over 90 percent of street police officers support concealed handgun laws. These are the people who see first-hand how reciprocity and concealed carry work. They know how important police are in deterring crime, but they also know that police almost always arrive at the crime scene after the criminal commits the crime and that self-defense is crucial to keeping people safe. Overwhelmingly, academic research finds that letting people carry concealed handguns reduces crime.
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So much of the gun control debate is about things that might go wrong, but with reciprocity, we don’t need to guess. With tens of millions of people legally carrying concealed handguns, if gun control advocates could point to hundreds or even dozens of cases where people with out-of-state permits caused problems, their concerns would be something to consider. But the problems are exceedingly rare. Americans don’t need to guess if gun control advocates concerns are justified.
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Two groups that benefit the most from carrying guns are the likeliest victims of crime (poor blacks in high-crime urban areas) and physically weaker people (women and the elderly). These are also the groups that have seen the largest percentage increases in concealed handgun permits over the last decade (2015 to 2024), with concealed handgun permits for women increasing 112% faster than for men and permits for blacks increasing 284% faster than for whites.
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Unfortunately, real life isn’t like the movies, where one woman can knock out and overpower several well-trained men. Even well-trained women often struggle to defend themselves against much larger and stronger men. Men also tend to be faster runners.
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A firearm represents a much bigger change in a woman’s ability to defend herself. Men can readily hurt women without a gun, and if a woman is already in physical contact with the attacker so that he can take away their gun, they are already in trouble.
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The peer-reviewed research by one of us shows that murder rates decline when people carry concealed handguns, be they men or women. But a woman carrying a concealed handgun reduces the murder rate for women by about 3 to 4 times more than a man doing the same.
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While the House is likely to pass national reciprocity, the battle in the Senate is much more difficult. To pass the bill in the Senate, 60 votes are required to break the filibuster Democrats will wage, and at least seven Democrat Senators will have to break ranks. But Democrat Senators need only look at the experience in their home states to see that there are no problems with reciprocity. Six states with twelve Democrat Senators recognize concealed handgun permits from the rest of the country: Arizona, Georgia, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Virginia. In none of those states is there any movement to restrict reciprocity.
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Police are extremely important. But there is no way for 720,000 police officers to be everywhere and protect 340 million people at once. Let’s make it so Americans aren’t afraid to go across state borders.
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