Our alert last week described a recent NBC News article on rising gun ownership in America, which cited national polling numbers showing that “[m]ore than half of American voters – 52% – say they or someone in their household owns a gun.” This represents “the highest share of voters who say that they or someone in their household owns a gun in the history of the NBC News poll, on a question dating back to 1999.” The actual gun owner numbers are likely to be still higher, given that most people are unwilling to discuss their personal details with complete strangers.
Another sign that the American public is still keen on guns is sales data. This year’s Black Friday smashed the previous Black Friday record, with firearm background checks “up over 11,000, or 5.5%, from the previous record set in 2017.” The most recent Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) statistics on the “top ten highest days” for National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) gun-related background checks has this year’s Black Friday as the highest “Black Friday” on record, and at third place overall.
The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has just published its latest annual study on concealed carry permits. Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States: 2023 (Nov. 30, 2023), authored by Dr. John Lott, Carlisle E. Moody and Rujun Wang, examines trends regarding concealed carry permits.
There’s good news here, as well.
Earlier, the CPRC’s 2022 study concluded that an estimated 22.01 million individuals in America had been issued a concealed handgun permit, a 2.3% increase over 2021. This was “the slowest percent and absolute increase that we have seen since we started collecting this data in 2011,” and the study attributed it, in part, to the 24 states at that time that had a permitless carry law in effect. The “number of permits declin[ed] in the Constitutional Carry states even though it is clear that more people are legally carrying.”
The CPRC’s newest study notes that, for the first year since its reporting began, the number of permits declined, albeit by a fraction of less than one percent (down 0.5% from 2022 figures). To put this in context, the number of permits overall has grown from 2.7 million in 1999 to “at least 21.8 million” as of the latest count.
Far from being an indicator of lessening interest in lawful concealed carrying, the dip is due to a change in applicable state laws, which allow qualified individuals to carry without application forms, fees, wait times, and other bureaucratic hoops. “A major cause of the marginal decline is that 27 states now have Constitutional Carry laws,” with Alabama, Florida and Nebraska most recently joining the states that allow permitless concealed carry. Significantly, the study notes that the 27 states with constitutional carry represent “65% of the land in the country and 44% of the population in 2022.”
With more than half of all states having embraced constitutional carry, “the concealed carry permits number does not paint a full picture of how many people are legally carrying across the nation … while permits are increasing in the non-Constitutional Carry states (317,185), permits fell even more in the Constitutional Carry ones even though more people are clearly carrying in those states (485,013).”
For this reason and others, the study cautions that the numbers cited are an underestimate, and that “the scale of that underestimation is increasing over time” due to old or missing data on permit issuance in some jurisdictions, and the continued spread of constitutional carry laws.
The CPRC study provides valuable data on permit holders by state, ranks states by the percentage of permit-holders in each state (with Alabama, Indiana, Colorado, Pennsylvania and Georgia as the top five), and lists the 2023 costs, by state, of getting a permit.
The study also breaks down data on permittees by race and gender for the jurisdictions that make that information available. “Seven states had data from 2012 to 2022/2023, and permit numbers grew 110.7% faster for women than for men.” As has been the trend in previous years, the concealed carry community remains increasingly diverse. “When permit data is broken down by race and gender, we find that black females have had the fast growth, especially during the pandemic. The rates of permit holding among American Indian, Asian, Black, and White females all grew much faster than the rates for males in those racial groups.”
The study points out that “there was a noticeable drop in the percent of permits issued [to] women and blacks after Constitutional Carry was adopted. It appears that both groups were relatively sensitive to the cost of permits.” Even in “shall issue” states, the application, training and other fees required to obtain a permit apparently present a real barrier to the exercise of Second Amendment rights, in many cases for the very people who are most vulnerable to crime and violence.
Another crucially important finding in the CPRC’s study is the relationship between crime and lawful carrying. Concealed handgun permit holders themselves “are extremely law-abiding,” and, [a]t the same time that there has been an exponential growth in permits, there has been a general linear decline in rates of homicide and violent crime offenses.
Except the extraordinary high rates of homicide offenses since the first year of the pandemic in 2020, the rate has dropped around 11% for the past two decades. Violent crime fell from 5.23 per 10 million people in 1999 to 3.81 per 10 million people in 2022, a 27% drop. Meanwhile, the percentage of adults with permits soared by five-fold. Such simple evidence by itself isn’t meant to show that concealed handgun permits reduce violent crime rates, as many factors account for changes in crime rates, but only that there doesn’t seem to be any obvious positive relationship between permits and crime.
In the meantime, the constitutional carry juggernaut presses on. The twenty-eighth state to go permitless is likely to be Louisiana. Republican Jeff Landry, Louisiana’s former Attorney General and new Governor, has made a commitment to secure the enactment of constitutional carry legislation in 2024.
In contrast, President Joe Biden – who has spent a significant part of his term down the gun-control rabbit hole – is running on a reelection platform of even more gun control. (The details are TBA as the “Joe’s Vision” tab, /joebiden.com/joes-vision/, at the official Biden/Harris 2024 website currently features a “Dark Brandon” error message and a graphic of a grinning Biden with two red blotches for eyes.)
Biden’s campaign is circulating a memo (“Trump’s America in 2025: More Guns, More Shootings, More Deaths”) that appears to build on the deceptive message that increased gun ownership means increased violence and crime. “More guns, not less. That’s Donald Trump’s plan to make us safe,” reads a statement from a Biden-Harris 2024 spokesperson.
For those looking for reasons to disagree with the “more guns, less safety” narrative, look to the millions of responsible gun owners across America who know better.
About NRA-ILA:
Established in 1975, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the “lobbying” arm of the National Rifle Association of America. ILA is responsible for preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals in the legislative, political, and legal arenas, to purchase, possess, and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution
These 104th ID Timberwolves are tearing about in a captured German Stug III
assault gun. Note the MP44 assault rifle in the gunner’s shield on the left.
Public domain photo.
He was the last one. Like the dodo, the Tasmanian tiger, the passenger pigeon, or the Great Auk, William Strickland was the very last of his species. Mr. Strickland was the last of my close personal friends who served in World War II, and now he’s gone. I’m honestly struggling with that.
The man died at age 95 after a rich, long life, exceptionally well-lived. He left behind a devoted wife and expansive family along with battalions of buddies like me. He had been in the local VA nursing home. Thanks to COVID-19 he and his wife had gone a year without touching one another. On a cosmic scale that was just wrong.
Mr. Strickland was an avid student of history and enjoyed a razor-sharp mind. He described events from seven decades ago like they happened last week. There will never be another like him.
I met Mr. Strickland as a patient. I somehow found out he was a veteran and asked the standard questions. The stories that followed moved me.
Mr. Strickland landed in France in September of 1944 at the age of 19 with the 104th Infantry Division, the “Timberwolves.” Eight months later the teenager was an old man. By VE Day he was the War Daddy, the soldier the younger troops were told to stick close to if they wanted to live. War uniquely ages a man.
Mr. Strickland wasn’t really a gun guy, but he definitely knew guns. He landed packing a Garand. They called it the M1. The M1 Carbine was the Carbine, and the M1A1 Thompson was the Thompson. There was, however, always only one M1.
One night he got tagged for a night patrol and wanted something handier than that long, heavy Infantry rifle. He traded his M1 to a 37mm antitank gunner for his Thompson submachine gun and just never gave it back. He said that 37mm was worthless against the German tanks they faced, so it wasn’t like that guy needed it.
We asked so much of those awesome old guys. They were indeed the very best of us.
The Tommy gun came with five 20-round stick magazines and no web gear. Mr. Strickland carried his magazines in the pockets of his field jacket along with piles of loose .45ACP ammo. He said that during every lull in the action he would drop down behind cover and thumb rounds into his magazines. He packed an M1911A1 pistol as well and extolled the many manifest virtues of ammunition commonality.
I’ve got several tales, but this was the most poignant. They were days from the end of the war, and everyone on both sides knew it. The 104th was pulled up on one bank of the Mulde tributary of the Elbe River, while the battered remnants of the Wehrmacht occupied the other. Everybody involved wanted to run out the clock and go home. Some overachiever in the chain of command, however, decided they needed a few prisoners to interrogate. That meant one last combat patrol.
Mr. Strickland’s best friend was a kid from New York named Sol. He and Sol had been together from the beginning, and they took point going into the village. They snatched a pair of beleaguered Krauts in short order and made haste to return. However, their patrol leader was a green Lieutenant who had not yet tasted proper war. He wanted to press on and find some trouble.
Mr. Strickland and Sol found themselves together crouching behind the corner of a brick building. The two young veterans decided this was as far as they were going, orders or not. They passed word back that they were turning around. However, Sol said he was going to take one quick peek around the corner.
Mr. Strickland said he tried to talk his friend out of this. The war was over, and there was nothing in that village that was ever going to make a difference. Sol was not to be dissuaded. He stepped around the corner and immediately caught a burst of 9mm to the chest from a German MP40.
Mr. Strickland leapt around his friend and tore the offending German soldier to pieces with his Thompson. They all then scurried back into the building, Sol under his own steam. Sol then sagged against the wall, sat down heavily, and died.
There wasn’t time to mourn. Mr. Strickland pushed the captured Germans ahead and ran out the back door headed for the river. They hit a tripwire in the backyard, and the two German captives were killed by an anti-personnel mine. The rest of the patrol, now minus his best friend, made it back across the river safely. The war ended mere days later.
In those seven months the Timberwolves suffered 4,961 casualties. In the same timeframe Mr. Strickland earned three Bronze Stars for Valor and a Purple Heart. When he returned home, he sought out Sol’s family in New York and told them what a great friend he had been. Even in his nineties Mr. Strickland was still justifiably bitter about that last patrol.
If you have old people in your life who are special, seek them out. Parents, mentors, friends, or heroes, believe me when I tell you that you are all on the clock. The opportunities to soak up their experience and wisdom are transient and fleeting. I will be forever grateful to call William Strickland a friend. They’ll never make another like him.
General Anthony McAuliffe sometime in or after 1955
(Photo: U.S. Army)
Military commanders have provided us with many quotable lines over the centuries and millennia of warfare, but it’s still hard to find men among them who are intrinsically connected to a single, widely and immediately recognized pithy phrase. “Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!” by Admiral David Farragut; “The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard dies for his” by General George Patton; these phrases capture the martial spirit of the men who uttered them, but even they pale in comparison to single most laconic and defiant quote of World War II: General Anthony McAuliffe’s “Nuts!” Today’s article is about the career of Anthony McAuliffe, who led the defense of Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge.
Anthony Clement McAuliffe (1898-1975) was born in Washington, D.C. to a government employee father and quickly turned toward a career in service of his country. He was admitted to West Virginia University in 1916, but America’s entry into World War I on April 1, 1917, prompted him to switch over to the War Emergency Course offered at West Point. He finished the accelerated program in November 1918, just after the war ended. He managed to stay in the Army despite the large downsizing that followed the war, graduating as a field artillery officer in 1920, and spending the next 16 years at various peacetime postings, including two stints on Oahu in Hawaii. His background placed him on tracks toward artillery operations and staff work, but McAuliffe really wanted to command combat troops, so he attended the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth.
McAuliffe as a West Point cadet
(Photo: The Howitzer)
For the time being, however, he had to stay in staff positions, and he was appointed to a study group examining race relations in the Army. The group recommended racial integration within the Army, a position McAuliffe continued to hold throughout his career, and would later be in a position to do something about.
In 1941, shortly before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, McAuliffe was posted to the Supply Division of the War Department General Staff as a temporary lieutenant colonel. At this post, he supervised the development of various pieces of military equipment, including the bazooka (Read our earlier article) and the jeep (Read our earlier article). McAuliffe finally got his chance for a combat posting in 1942, when he was promoted to colonel and placed in command of the artillery elements of a newly formed unit, the 101st Airborne Division. (Read our earlier article)
General William C. Lee, the first commander of the 101st Airborne, reviewing the unit in 1942
(Photo: Roberston Collection)
The 101st was specifically created to participate in the Normandy landings, but the long buildup for Operation Overlord meant they only got to see action for the first time in the summer of 1944. McAuliffe, a brigadier general by the time, jumped with his men into German-held territory on the chaotic night of June 6. (Read our earlier article) Confident in the ability of the 101st to achieve victory, he handed out signed 100-franc notes before boarding the planes in England so that the men could invite each other to celebratory drinks later.
A soldier of the 101st Airborne Division boarding a C-47 for the flight to Normandy
(Photo: U.S. Army)
His optimism initially seemed somewhat unfounded, as he landed three miles from the intended drop zone. To make things worse, McAuliffe’s direct superior, General Don F. Pratt, died on D-Day as he was coming in aboard a glider. The glider made contact with the ground, but landed on wet tall grass which caused it to skid out of the landing zone and into a hedgerow of poplar trees. Pratt, sitting in his jeep tethered inside the glider, died from a broken neck caused by whiplash; the copilot was impaled and killed by a branch, and the pilot suffered severe injuries with both legs broken. McAuliffe quickly assumed Pratt’s position and organized the capture and defense of two strategically important locations: a bridge over the Vire River, and the village of Pouppeville; in the following days, he also led a successful attack on Carentan.
McAuliffe next led his men into battle in September 1944, in the ill-fated Operation Market Garden, (Read our earlier article)where he landed alongside his troops in a glider. The operation was a failure (euphemistically dubbed “a 90% success” at the time), but the 101st, led by General Maxwell Taylor (Read our earlier article), managed to make it back to friendly lines.
McAuliffe giving last-minute instructions to his men before departing from England on D-Day+1 day during Operation Market Garden (Photo: U.S. Air Force)
McAuliffe’s finest hour came in the winter of 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge. The 101st was posted to the Ardennes Forest to rest and recover after taking heavy losses in Market Garden. The area was believed to be quiet and safe, as the poor road network in the heavily forest region was believed unsuitable for armored advances, and thus safe form any German counterattacks.
Naturally, this belief turned out to be entirely wrong when Hitler launched Operation Wacht am Rhein (“Watch on the Rhine”), his last major counterattack on the Western Front, directly through the Ardennes. The road and railway hub town of Bastogne suddenly became a vital point in the war: if the Germans managed to capture it, they could use it to move their troops through the forests much more quickly.
Elements from the 101st Airborne, the 10th Armored Division, the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion and 755th Field Artillery Battalion were rushed to Bastogne to defend it. Maxwell Taylor, the commanding officer of the 101st, was in the United States on a conference, so McAuliffe, normally only in charge of the division’s artillery, had to step up to the plate and command the defense effort.
McAuliffe (center) and two other officers holding Bastogne’s town sign
(Photo: U.S. Army)
The details of the desperate battle for Bastogne, and its importance in the larger Battle of the Bulge unfolding around it, are beyond the scope of this article. It should suffice to say that McAuliffe achieved historic greatness in the besieged Belgian town, not only with his tenacious defense, but also with his spirited, now iconic reply to a German demand for surrender with a single word: NUTS! (A detailed description of the event can be read in one of our earlier articles here) One little-known detail of the event was that McAuliffe was checking on his wounded men earlier in the day, before the German messengers showed up. One man rose from his litter, saying “Don’t give up on account of us, General Mac!” McAuliffe quickly assured him that he wouldn’t – and kept his word a few hours later.
McAuliffe and his staff having Christmas dinner in Bastogne during the battle
(Photo: U.S. Army)
The famous reply was first uttered, then put in writing, on December 22, and it didn’t take long for the story to take wing. A news dispatch sent on the same day and appearing in American newspapers on the 26th reported: “When a German carrying a white flag came forward with the demand for surrender, he gave the American commander a false report that three towns far to the west were in German hands. The American commander sent him right back with “no” for an answer.”
The actual word used instead of “no” became publicly know two days later with another news item: “The heroic American garrison pointed artillery, machine guns and mortars in all directions after their commander sent a curt one-word reply — “Nuts!” — to the Germans’ surrender ultimatum.” McAuliffe’s identity as the commander who sent the message only became known another two days later.
Interestingly, the German messengers weren’t the only people confused by the meaning of the famous reply. The French press agency also had a problem interpreting the slang phrase, and eventually (and incorrectly) settled on it being short for “Vous n’etes que de vieilles noix” – “You are nothing but old nuts.”
A humorous postcard commemorating McAuliffe’s famous reply
(Image: contemporary postcard)
Once the defenders of Bastogne were relieved, McAuliffe was quickly awarded the Distinguished Service Cross by General Patton (Read our earlier article), and was promoted to major general and given command of the 103rd Infantry Division. The division and McAuliffe spent the rest of the war mopping up German resistance along the west shore of the Rhine, advancing into Germany and Austria, and capturing the Brenner Pass across the Alps, finally allowing Allied troops in Italy and the rest of Europe to link up.
Patton decorating McAuliffe with the Distinguished Service Cross
(Photo: U.S. Army)
McAuliffe held many positions in the decade after World War II, and was promoted to four-star general in 1955. In that decade, he was, among other things, the Chief Chemical Officer of the Army Chemical Corps, Head of Army Personnel, and Army Secretary of the Joint Research and Development Board. In 1946, he was also the Army Ground Forces advisor to Operation Crossroads, the above-ground atomic bomb test at the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. From 1949 onward, he returned to field commands, first in occupied Japan, and later in Europe.
The Baker event during Operation Crossroads
(Photo: U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps)
At the beginning of the 50s, McAuliffe returned to a cause he had already served once earlier in his career, and which would become the achievement he was the proudest of: the desegregation of the Army. Most African-American soldiers were in transport and service units during World War II; African-American combat units did exist, but were segregated from white units. This segregation remained into the Korean War. During a 1950 review of the policy, McAuliffe recommended that black soldiers remain in segregated units, not because of any lack of combat capability, but because of the racist attitudes in the rest of the Army. Instead, he proposed the creation of more black units, as the already existing ones were overstaffed.
By 1951, however, the changing situation in Korea already forced the racial integration of several combat units to solve manpower shortages. These units suffered no serious morale problems or loss of combat capability, so McAuliffe revised his previous opinion and recommended full integration throughout the Army.
By the end of 1951, he ordered all Far East commands to prepare and submit integration plans, and did the same to European commands the next year. The Army’s desegregation ended up taking some time, but it did manage to become one of the most integrated organization in 1970s American society.
A desegregated unit in Korea
(Photo: National Archives)
McAuliffe retired from the Army in 1956. He put his knowledge of chemical warfare to good use in civilian life and took a position on the board of directors of a chemicals company. He also acted as chairman of the New York State Civil Defense Commission from 1960 to 1963. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The central square of the town of Bastogne is now called Place Général McAuliffe and has a bust of McAuliffe and a Sherman tank pierced by a German 88mm shell standing in one of its corners.
The bust of McAuliffe and the damaged Sherman tank at McAuliffe Square in Bastogne (Photo: Author’s own)
Soldiers decorate a Christmas tree in Germany, December 1944
(Photo: U.S. Army)