Alex Padilla U.S. Senator for California

By Mike Spies

For as long as there has been a gun-rights movement, the movement’s leaders, industry representatives, and academic supporters have argued that carrying firearms made Americans more secure. Studies conducted over the past 14 years by the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the gun industry’s trade group, have meanwhile found that the practice is a boon for business. But what is good for profits, according to one NSSF study from that period, has resulted in a harmful trade-off: As armed Americans have moved into public spaces, people in every corner of society have felt an increased sense of danger.

That market-research report, produced in 2018 and titled “Multi-Generational Research: Purchases, Perceptions, and Participation for the Firearms Industry,” was based on a survey of 1,800 people, spanning four generations, from baby boomers to Gen Z, and asked a wide range of questions covering a variety of gun-related topics. The researchers concluded that “more Americans feel less safe when it comes to people legally carrying concealed guns in public.” The finding applied to non-gun owners and gun owners alike, as well as to both ends of the political spectrum. “While millennials, liberals, and non-owners are more adamant about feeling less safe,” the study continued, “a majority of gun owners and conservatives also don’t feel safe when it comes to concealed carry.”

In spite of these findings, the NSSF is pushing the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, a federal bill that would bar states from fully enforcing their laws on gun carrying. The bill has broad support among conservative lawmakers, with 186 Republican co-sponsors in the House and 46 in the Senate. If the legislation arrives on President Trump’s desk, he has pledged to sign it.

In addition to the 2018 report, The Trace and Rolling Stone obtained four other NSSF-funded reports, covering a period between 2011 and 2024. Taken together, those reports show, in plain writing, that concealed carry is a pivotal driver of gun-industry profits, and turning away from it would be detrimental to business.

After these findings were summarized for Senator Alex Padilla, a California Democrat, he said, “The gun industry isn’t just selling firearms; it’s selling fear, even to its own customers.” Padilla added that the reciprocity bill “would decimate longstanding, common-sense gun regulations, making it impossible for states like California to choose how they protect their residents and endangering countless law-enforcement officials. This would be outrageous federal overreach and wouldn’t make anyone safer — it would just make it easier for the gun lobby to turn a profit.”

In modern America, the practice of concealed carry was once strictly regulated, and local authorities commonly held wide discretion over who received a permit. But in the 1980s, the gun lobby spearheaded a nationwide effort to loosen restrictions. During the next two decades it became possible in most states for a person to acquire a carry permit if they could legally purchase a firearm, pay a nominal fee, and pass a rudimentary training course. Some 23 million Americans now have permits, according to an estimate from the United States Concealed Carry Association.

That figure, though, does not account for another tectonic shift over the past decade: Americans carrying guns without a permit. Twenty-nine states have eliminated them entirely, allowing a legal handgun owner to carry their weapon in public, hidden from view, regardless of whether they know how to use it.

For now, a law that allows a resident of one state to carry a concealed handgun often does not give that person license to do so in another. New York and California, for example, home to the country’s most populous cities, have implemented strict guidelines, including reference checks, and not following them is a criminal offense.

Since the start of the Trump era, the NSSF has zealously advocated for legislation that would override local control over carry laws, arguing against a “confusing patchwork of ever-changing rules for firearm owners when traveling across state lines.” The NSSF-endorsed Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act would allow a person who legally carries a handgun in their home state to carry everywhere in the country, regardless of their proficiency, or whether they could pass reference checks that might raise concerns.

The NSSF, a nonprofit, is the gun industry’s chief representative on matters of gun policy, and its core purpose is to do whatever it can to help ensure the industry’s future. One way it achieves this goal is by funding market research for its members, who largely consist of gun retailers and manufacturers, not the general public, who in most instances does not have ready access to the research, which lives behind a costly paywall.

In the 2018 multigenerational study, respondents were asked to finish this open-ended statement: “People legally carrying concealed guns makes me feel …” Overall, 57 percent of non-gun owners said “less safe,” while another 27 percent said “no impact.” Meanwhile, 28 percent of gun owners specifically said they felt “less safe,” on top of another 27 percent who said they felt “no impact.” That meant, the researchers noted, that despite the prominence of concealed carry, a majority of gun owners “still don’t feel safer.”

The study also raised serious concerns about the future. After a decade of high-profile mass shootings, including Sandy Hook and Parkland, the “majority of Millennials want change,” it found, with 59 percent stating they would “support a political movement to abolish the Second Amendment.” The study warned: “the NSSF may have already lost millennials.”

During previous calls for reform, the industry and its boosters have argued that a significant portion of Americans are on their side. But, according to the study, this was not true. Despite, for example, the National Rifle Association’s defiant posture after Sandy Hook, the study found that only 18 percent of respondents “completely” agreed that “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun, is a good guy with a gun,” followed by 20 percent who agreed “somewhat.” Americans, in other words, did not believe that the solution to the problem was more gun carrying. “Changes to current gun laws seem inevitable,” the study said, “with a majority of Americans thinking that gun laws should be made stronger and 72% of Americans saying that passing additional gun laws would have an impact on gun violence in America.”

As the NSSF enthusiastically promotes reciprocity legislation, it has never publicly disclosed its awareness of concealed carry’s negative psychological effects on all types of Americans, including gun owners.

The organization declined to provide a comment for this story, and neither the White House nor the bill’s primary sponsors, Senator John Cornyn and Representative Richard Hudson, responded to questions about the multigenerational study’s findings.

“Responsible gun owners know that carrying a firearm safely is a skill that requires years of practice and training, and many of them are rightly concerned about everyday carry because they know it’s dangerous,” says Senator Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat to whom The Trace and Rolling Stone also described the findings of the NSSF studies. “The gun industry spends millions of dollars lobbying for policies that put guns into the hands of people who have no idea how to use them responsibly because they care about making money.”

In the 1990s, leading gun-rights advocates and conservative lawmakers strategically embraced conspiracy, fearmongering, and hyperpartisan politics to mobilize voters. As the decade came to a close, the strategy was just beginning to bear fruit for the firearms industry. At the time, 26 percent of gun owners said they owned a firearm for self-defense, according to a widely cited survey by Pew, and there were only 2.7 million permit holders nationwide. But over the next decade and a half, as carry laws continued to loosen, that number jumped to 48 percent, becoming the top reason, by far, for owning a gun. During the same period, there was a roughly fivefold increase in permit holders.

The more that fear was stoked among Americans, the more they were motivated to purchase firearms for protection. And the majority of the buyers were people who already owned guns.

In 2011, the NSSF commissioned a report on handgun ownership and usage, based on a survey of nearly 11,000 handgun owners. Ninety percent of the respondents owned an average of 7.4 handguns, while only 10 percent owned one. Nearly 70 percent of the multiple-handgun owners said they planned to buy another firearm in the next year, while more than 50 percent of single-handgun owners planned to do the same.

For those who already owned multiple handguns, which was almost everyone, the report said, “The main use for their most recently purchased handgun is concealed carry.” The report added that 61 percent of single-handgun owners who had bought their weapon sometime over the past three years planned to acquire a concealed-carry permit within a year, while 35 percent already had one.

Between 2012 and 2018, Americans experienced public carnage at a relentless pace. There was the movie-theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado; Sandy Hook; the vigilante killing of Trayvon Martin; the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina; the Pulse night club massacre; and the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history, at a Las Vegas music festival. After 17 high school students and staff were gunned down in Parkland, Florida, calls for reform were louder than ever before, creating a perilous moment for the gun industry.

Yet the gun industry and its support groups continued their absolutist position against regulation, pushing for civilians to arm up and advocating for laws that would make it as easy as possible to carry firearms in public. The financial incentive could not be ignored. In 2018, the NSSF produced a report titled “Concealed Carry Market,” a study based on more than 4,500 survey respondents and drawn from lists generated by gun-rights groups. The report overtly ties concealed carry to profit. “The more frequently someone carries a handgun the more they tend to spend on carry handguns, ammunition and accessories,” the study reads. It goes on to stipulate the relationship is correlational, but specifies, “This trend is very strong and held across all categories and for both men and women.”

The report also noted the “explosive growth” in permit holders, which, it pointed out, “does not include individuals in states that do not require a permit.” The report added: “As conceal carry laws continue to ease across the country, it is anticipated that the number of permit holders will continue to increase. As the ranks increase so will the need for carry-friendly handguns, ammunition and carry equipment and accessories.”

Every few years, the NSSF produces retail reports, based on surveys with hundreds of gun retailers. As The Trace and Rolling Stone reported in June, white male buyers comprise some 60 percent of the gun market — a vast overrepresentation that may be creating a pipeline of heavily armed extremists. The surveys also show that, year in and year out, handguns account for 40 to 45 percent of firearms sales, more than any other weapon. In the group’s most recent report on first-time gun buyers, covering a purchase period between 2021 and 2024, researchers found that 64 percent of respondents bought a semi-automatic pistol. When asked what gun-related issue most concerned them, more than 40 percent of gun buyers answered, “Restrictions on carrying a firearm in public places.”

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