If the number of Tennessee women getting handgun carry permits had more than doubled since 2011, would you notice?
News stories like this one suggest you would. But with an estimated 3.3 million females in the state, maybe the trend wouldn’t be so easy to spot.
Based on figures from the Tennessee Department of Public Safety’s Handgun Data page, the piece correctly reports that the number of women who received handgun carry permits in Tennessee more than doubled from 2011 to 2013. Specifically, the count rose from 24,614 in 2011 to 58,833 in 2013, an increase of 34,219, or 139 percent.
Sounds impressive. For starters, though, not all of those permits were new ones. Some were renewals; handgun carry permits expire four years after their issue dates. Others were duplicates issued to replace existing permits that had gotten lost, damaged or whatever. Still others were issued to people who moved into Tennessee while holding a valid handgun carry permit from another state. Still others were issued for free, usually to replace a permit the state somehow goofed up on.
Tennessee doesn’t report these breakdowns by gender, but it does report them for men and women combined. The figures from 2008 to 2013 look like this:
Handgun carry permits issued in Tennessee, total and by type, 2008-2013
So, in any given year, roughly half of the handgun carry permits issued are brand new. The other half are mostly renewals of existing permits, and trace numbers are issued as duplicates, for free, or to people moving into the state with a permit from another state. And, interestingly, there seems to be a pattern: Peaks seem to be evident in 2009 and 2013, both for new permits and for renewals.
Even so, the climb in new permits over the period looks impressive. Remember, though, that the state’s population increased over the period as well. More people naturally means more permits. Here’s a look at the number of permits issued to men and women annually in Tennessee between 2008 and 2013, expressed as a percentage of each year’s estimated male and female population.
Percentages of Tennessee males and females issued handgun carry permits, 2008-2013
Both trends may still look pretty significant; the line for both men and women echo those earlier-spotted peaks in 2009 and 2013, but both clearly trend upward across the period between 2008 and 2013. The percentage for women rose from about half a percent in 2011 to nearly 2 percent in 2013. Among men, the percentage rose from one and a half percent in 2008 to just over 4 percent in 2013.
This might be a good time, though, to think about what you saw the last time you looked through a microscope at the goings-on in a drop of pond water. Chances are you saw something that looked monstrously alive and fast-moving, but only because the microscope gave you an extremely up-close view of it. In our everyday lives of things measured in miles, feet, yards and inches, things the size of protozoa aren’t noticeable.
The same is true in statistics. Up close, a difference of just a percentage point or two can look like a lot of change. But if you zoom out enough to show those same changes on the full range of the percentage scale – from zero percent to 100 percent – they can get kind of hard to notice. Here’s what the changes in the percentages of men and women receiving handgun carry permits between 2008 and 2013 look like “zoomed out” to full scale:
Percentages of Tennessee males and females issued handgun carry permits, 2008-2013, zero-to-100-percent scale
Seen full scale, the statewide increase in handgun carry permits, both among women and among men, looks like more of a creep than a jump. And while an analysis based solely on estimates of the state’s 21-and-older population would give a better indication of this point – 21 being the minimum age at which one can obtain a handgun carry permit – it appears that, despite the increase in their numbers, handgun carry permit holders of either gender remain a small percentage of the state’s overall population.
— By Ken Blake, editor, The Data Reporter