After taking many self-defense classes and talking with many concealed carry people, here are my uncomfortable truths.
- Most civilians don’t practice enough
- Most civilians don’t train enough
- Most civilians don’t refresh their training
- Most civilians are equipment focused rather than skill focused
- Most civilians don’t maintain their equipment properly
- Most civilians have not taken emergency medical training and can’t “stop the bleeding” or “start the breathing” on themselves, their loved ones, or innocent victims
- Because of all these things, most civilians are not qualified to carry a round in the chamber, operate complex (e.g., semi-automatic) firearms, or render aid to an injured party before the EMTs arrive.
I hate to say it, but the truth hurts.
How do I know these uncomfortable truths? Partly via experience but partly just doing some simple math and conservative estimates.
First, what we are going to do is estimate the number of people who carry in Arizona. Look at Arizona and the number of active concealed carry permits (reference citation at the bottom). The latest data is from 2022.
- 2022 – Arizona 458,775 active permits
- 8.1% of adults have a permit (adult pop: 5,663,888)
- 24.4% of permit holders are women (75/25 split)
- Arizona is also a permitless state for ages 21 and older
Permitless concealed carry, and open carry are different. Estimating their number takes a lot of work. I would go with 50% of permit holders for permitless and about 5% for open carry as my off-the-wall estimate. This would be:
- X = 458775 + 458775(0.5) + 458775(0.05)
- X = 458775 + 229387 + 22938
- X =711,100
Percent of Arizona adult population: 12.5%
In contrast, the Bureau of Justice 2018 statistics show that Arizona had about 26,865 full-time state and local law enforcement agency employees. In short, about 3.8% of 711,100 is the total number of police officers in Arizona (active patrolling police officers would be less as this number includes administrative roles, but that may not be important as this data is from 2018 and not 2022). Source: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/census-state-and-local-law-enforcement-agencies-2018-statistical-tables
Now, what type of training and hours should these people be getting? Let’s look at what law enforcement does in training camps.
“Recruits were required to spend an average of 168 hours of training on weapons, defensive tactics, the use of force, and nonlethal weapons.”
Source: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Census of Law Enforcement Training Academies, 2013. Summary: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/slleta13_sum.pdf ; Full Report: https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/slleta13.pdf
Let’s halve that number of hours and assume it focused on firearms, around 84 hours. Any refresher training would be around one-third of that or 28 hours per year. In addition, let’s put regular practice at 30min per week. You would be looking at about 24 hours per year.
The first year of training would be 84 hours + 24 hours for 108 hours. Each year after that, you would have 52 hours per year of practice and refresher training. The only people I know who train at this level are Firearm Instructors because they are constantly giving classes and helping students.
Back to some simple math. Let’s assume that the number of people who carry in Arizona increases by 1% each year. This would be 7,111 new carriers each year. Thus classes in Arizona that would train these people would need to support each of them training for 108 hours each, or 767,988 hours per year. To sustain training, the existing 711,100 would need 52 hours per year, for 36,977,200 hours of a combination of range time and class time. Note that this doesn’t include the range time of police officers or people who enjoy shooting but do not carry.
I don’t see the infrastructure in Arizona capable of supporting it.
I come back to this repeatedly: it is a good thing that 79% of defensive gun uses for civilians happen at home, and 82% of the time, the firearm is not discharged.
Citation:
Lott, John R., Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States: 2022 (November 17, 2022). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4279137 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4279137