Via Independent:
The number of Americans interested in obtaining concealed carry permits to secretly bear arms in public has jumped dramatically since the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in February – with some states having seen as much as a 250 per cent increase in training requests for this type of permit.
In the 50 days since the Parkland, Florida shooting, companies and networks of firearm instructors that provide training for the permits in dozens of states have seen enquiries spike. One company said it had even received more requests for training than after the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.
“There’s been a lot of shootings, unfortunately, in this country, but we’ve never seen a spike this big before, even with Newtown,” Chris Schultrop, the CEO and co-founder of Minnesota-based concealed permit training network National Carry Academy (NCA), which works across 27 states, told The Independent.
The intensified interest comes as some Republicans in Washington are leading a push to pass a sweeping national concealed carry law that would force states to recognise all permits issued in the United States. That would mean states that do not allow concealed carry permits would have to allow people to use them. Meanwhile, teenage survivors of the Valentine’s Day Parkland shooting are leading a national movement pushing in the opposite direction; for stricter gun control laws.
An analysis by NCA found that it had seen a 103.5 per cent increase in interest in it’s trainings in the month following the Parkland, Florida shooting in February, including a spike of as much as 283 per cent in Ohio.
That’s similar to what other networks have experienced, like Concealed Carry Inc, which markets itself as the largest concealed carry training network in the United States and works across 28 states. Jacob Paulsen, a trainer with the network, said that it saw about a 250 per cent increase in interest over concealed carry in Florida alone, and at least a 100 per cent increase in its network as a whole.