How Many Registered Firearms In Florida

March 8, 2017

The gunshine country: nobody knows how many firearms are in Florida

The country authorities only requires registration of concealed weapons, leaving many unaccounted for

How many guns are in that location in Florida? Nobody really knows.

Final April, at the National Rifle Association's annual convention, presidential hopeful Jeb Bush-league bragged that his home state of Florida had "well over ane.3 million police-abiding Floridians with a valid curtained weapons permit."

"That's the well-nigh in the nation," he said.

Politifact has confirmed that, yeah, Florida does have the nigh guns – and that number has steadily climbed, jumping to i.9 1000000 at concluding count on Feb. 28, 2016.

However, the key phrase in Bush'due south statement is "concealed weapons allow." Florida police force does not require licensing of firearm purchasers or registration of the weapons, just mandating that concealed weapons must be permitted. This means information is only kept for concealed firearms, which also means nobody actually knows how many unconcealed firearms there are.

Then in Florida, if your handgun isn't concealed, the government doesn't fifty-fifty know you take one.

We filed the same request with the Sheriff'south Departments in each of the 67 counties in Florida, asking for policies and statistics regarding gun conquering, licensure, and transfer. We were quickly told all licensing for concealed firearms comes from the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Diplomacy, who as well maintain a database of full concealed weapons permits. We were also told nosotros could contact the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to find out how many new and used guns have been sold, but that Florida has no central registration of whatsoever of these records. Nobody can definitively say but how many guns there are, right now, in the land.

Similarly, county sheriff'south departments are given data most firearms licenses, acquisitions, and transfers as a copy for local law enforcement, but can simply proceed this information for near 20 days. After that it must be destroyed. No database is maintained.

We also requested from the sheriff's department'due south data on incidents involving firearms. Information technology turns out, at the stop of the year, Florida Department of Law Enforcement releases Uniform Criminal offense Reports (UCR) on each county. The UCRs highlight many crimes, but for our sake we focused on those that segregated data for firearm involvement, which included murder, rape, fondling, robbery, and aggravated assault.

All this seems straightforward enough … except the numbers in FDLE's reports and the numbers given by the sheriff's departments didn't always add together up.

In Orange County, for example, the 2015 UCR said there were 1,714 aggravated assaults involving a firearm.

But the sheriff'due south department said there were only 440.

With excuses ranging from proverb the information sent to us was the same information they sent the state, to the information sent to u.s.a. may have been pulled prior to last submission to FDLE, no sheriff's department could adequately explain farthermost discrepancies in data. The Hernando County Sheriff'south Function did, however, provide the states with the UCR Transmission, which provided an interesting perspective.

It seems in these cases the sheriff'due south departments accept limited jurisdiction, and other local law enforcement agencies also submit crime data to the state for terminal UCR tally.

What'southward interesting is that the UCR only accounts for one offense per incident, using a ranking organisation to determine which offense was the worst. Say, for example, ane incident involved both a simple set on and a robbery, but the robbery would be counted, considering it is the highest-ranking offense in their organisation.

So does this really give us a complete glimpse into Florida crime? You decide.

Read the full UCR manual embedded below, or on the request folio.

Epitome by Cory Doctorow via Wikimedia Commons and is licensed under CC By-SA ii.0