Not really.
Rutherford County ranks among Tennessee’s top five counties in terms of the number of handgun carry permits held by its residents, a statistic cited in a recent local news report picked up by The Associated Press. As the chart shows, though, the picture changes if one takes county population sizes into consideration by looking at the number of permits per 100 county residents.
Click the “Permits held,” “Population” and “Permits per 100 residents” to explore the relationship between handgun carry permits and population levels in Tennessee’s counties.
Rutherford and the four other counties that have the most handgun carry permits also have the largest numbers of residents. Naturally, the more residents a county has, the more handgun carry permits it has. In terms of the number of handgun carry permits per 100 residents, Rutherford County ranks below the state median, as do the state’s other heavily populated counties.
The chart’s columns represent Tennessee’s most populous counties, plus the least-populous county (Pickett), the county with the most permits per 100 residents (Fayette), and the statewide median. All data are from 2013.
Below are the data for all Tennessee counties. Use the “Search” box to filter the information. Click a column heading to sort the data by that column.
— By Ken Blake, editor, The Data Reporter