Concealed Carry & Home Defense

CCW Weekend: Why I Finally Applied For My CCW Permit

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By Sam Hoober, GunBelts.com

Believe it or not, I didn’t actually apply for my CCW permit until recently – despite working for a gun belt company, writing this column and generally being, in my own little way, a gun rights advocate. I believe firmly in the Second Amendment, and that responsible citizens who can legally possess firearms shouldn’t be barred from doing so, or from carrying them.

Ideally, no one should NEED a permit; I don’t need a permit to speak freely and there isn’t a permit required to not be searched by police, and so on. These are inalienable rights; permits have the habit of making rights into mere privileges. However, I accept that most states require a permit, including my home state of Washington. (Yes, our beer really is better than yours and you’ll just have to live with it.) Regardless of what I feel or think about permit laws, they are the law of the land – and I will abide by them until the laws change.

Getting my concealed carry permit was one of those “I’ll get to it” things. Granted, there were barriers; Washington state requires one to apply, be fingerprinted and pay the fee in person. I have to be in the office on almost all days when I could apply and at other times there were other things that were just more important. Besides, spending time at the police station cuts into my fishing time.

However, my wife recently gave birth to our first child. Not that we live in a dangerous area (we don’t) or that anything bad has happened recently to completely convince me that I really need to be armed at all times – it hasn’t.

I know the odds that I’ll ever have to engage in any kind of defensive gun use are very low. For instance, according to the FBI, only a few hundred acts of justifiable homicide by private citizens – meaning killing a criminal while said felonious person was committing a crime – occur per year; in 2012, only 310 such incidents occurred, and 40 fewer – 270 incidents – occurred in 2011. Other types of defensive gun use, or “DGU” as it is often abbreviated, are more difficult to quantify; see, for instance, this discussion of the topic at Reason. Studies on DGU vary in methodology and conclusions. Some sources assert somewhere between 2 to 3 million DGU incidents per year, others find less than a tenth of those estimates.

Thus, I can safely assume that the only living thing I’m likely to pull a gun on or shoot any time soon will be some grouse when the season opens. (Any grouse thusly obtained will also be paired with a better beer than many other people’s grouse will, because Washington.) If I’m lucky, some turkeys and perhaps a deer will follow.

That all said, after the birth occurred, I had some time away from the office and while musing that “maybe I should finally go apply for my permit” one day, it dawned on me that now I have more people to look out for. What if that rare instance where I need to defend myself outside the home occurs? What if it occurs when my wife, child (and any subsequent children, should they occur) or both are with me? Again, the odds overwhelmingly are that I’ll never really need one, but if I did…I don’t know that I want to have to say “I relied on the odds that I wouldn’t need one” after the fact.

Carrying a gun is really a type of insurance policy; common platitudes like “better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6” or “better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it” mean basically that exact same thing. I definitely agree, which spurred me to finally apply for my CCW permit.

It honestly wasn’t that bad. I filled out a couple forms, paid the fee and had my prints taken. Since police use digital fingerprinting these days, I didn’t even have to deal with any ink on my hands. Washington state doesn’t have a training requirement and even if there was one, I likely wouldn’t have to worry because I have taken hunter’s safety – which satisfies many states’ training requirement for the permit. I was out the door in less than 40 minutes, and received the permit in less than 30 days.

I suppose the next step is shopping for a carry gun and a holster. I think I know where I can find a decent gun belt…

Sam Hoober is Contributing Editor for GunBelts.com, a subsidiary of Hayden-based Tedder Industries, where he writes about gun accessories, gun safety, open and concealed carry tips.