Plain Dealer: New Ohio concealed handgun licenses jumped 78% during chaotic 2020

The Cleveland Plain Dealer is reporting that statistics released by the Ohio Attorney General's office show new Ohio concealed handgun licenses (CHLs) jumped 78% in 2020 over the previous year, while renewed licenses reached their third-highest annual total ever.

From the article:

Last year, Ohio sheriffs issued 96,892 new conceal-carry licenses – the most since 2016 and the third-most in the last decade, according to the report from Attorney General Dave Yost’s office.

Meanwhile, 72,340 Ohio gun owners renewed their licenses in 2020, the report stated. While that marked the second straight year renewed licenses have decreased in Ohio, 2018 and 2019 were the top two years for renewed concealed-firearms licenses since such permits were first issued in 2004.

In total, there are now approximately three-quarters of a million Ohio CHL-holders in Ohio.

Demand for licenses and problems causes by the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic necessitated Buckeye Firearms Association to push for passage of legislation to ensure that Ohio's CHL-holders would be able to continue to legally exercise their right to carry.

On March 25, 2020, House Bill 197 was passed with an amendment to extend Concealed Handgun License expirations for 90 days if the expiration fell during the state of emergency in Ohio, declared by Executive Order 2020-01D, issued on March 9, 2020, but not beyond December 1, 2020.

Later in 2020, Buckeye Firearms Association again pressed for passage of legislation to address continued problems. On Thursday, Oct. 1, 2020, Ohio Governor DeWine signed House Bill 614, with an amendment to extend Concealed Handgun License (CHL) expiration dates by 90 days or until June 30, 2021, whichever is late, as well as to allow applicants to apply for a license or renew a license at ANY sheriff office in Ohio, rather than being limited to their home county or an adjacent county.

Again, from the Plain Dealer:

Dean Rieck, executive director of the Buckeye Firearms Association, said the reason so many Ohioans sought conceal-carry permits last year was because a number of things happened in 2020 that made people uneasy.

The coronavirus crisis, which started last spring, “freaked out a lot of people” and made them think more about their security, Rieck said. On top of that, he said, many gun owners got “riled up” by “riots,” including arson, vandalism and looting, that took place over last summer.

The 2020 presidential race, in which Democrat Joe Biden unseated Republican Donald Trump, also played a role, Rieck said.

“Every time there’s an election year where a Democrat might get elected, there’s always going to be a rise in gun sales, and therefore there’s going to be a corresponding rise in concealed-handgun licenses,” he said.

Rieck said he wasn’t surprised that the number of renewed licenses fell last year, as the pandemic led many Ohio sheriffs to cancel license appointments and limit hours of operation.

“In some extreme cases, people were saying they couldn’t get in (to renew their license) for nine months, 10 months, (or) a year,” Rieck said.

The article goes on to say that the number of license suspensions and revocations in 2020 each dropped to their lowest level in years. CHL suspensions fell from 1,956 in 2019 to 1,618 in 2020; revocations dropped from 939 in 2019 to 429 in 2020.

As we have been pointing out for the better part of two decades, CHL-holders are an extremely law-abiding population. Less than one half of one percent of all CHLs have ever been revoked for any reason. Second Amendment opponents in the establishment media love to make a big deal about the exceptional cases where a CHL breaks the law, but say almost nothing about the more than 99% of law-abiding license holders, many of whom have used their gun to protect life.

Indeed, an analysis of the CHL application and approval process conducted by the Ohio Attorney General Dave Yosts's office in 2020 found that the background check process has been highly successful.

From coverage on BuckeyeFirearms.org last summer:

[T]he Attorney General’s Office (AGO), through a memorandum of understanding, made a request for a list of active Ohio CHL holders from the Ohio Department of Public Safety (ODPS), which maintains the licenses in its Law Enforcement Automated Data System, a tool used strictly for criminal justice matters. That list, confidential under Ohio law, can be used for law enforcement purposes only.

With the list of the roughly 700,000 CHL holders in hand, the AGO matched identifying information of those individuals against a data set managed by the Attorney General’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) containing the names of individuals who have been deemed to be mentally incompetent.

What BCI found in its review is that, of the nearly three-quarters of a million Ohioans who have a CHL, only 41 of them (0.006%) had been deemed to be mentally incompetent — which means they should not have had a concealed-handgun license or possessed a firearm. Of the 41, just six (.00085%) had occurred before the issuance of the license. The other 35 adjudications occurred after the issuance of the license, and would likely have been detected if the CHL-holder sought a renewal.

“Everyone in Ohio should expect that we are enforcing existing laws – and, as this report demonstrates, we are,” Yost said.

“Those 41 individuals represent only a tiny fraction of a percentage of the Ohioans who have concealed-carry licenses, and we are not aware that any harmful outcomes have resulted,” AG Yost said.

As Attorney General Yost stated when issuing his report, “by any measure, our concealed-carry system is a success.”

To download the entire OAG 2020 Annual Report, click here.

Chad D. Baus served as Buckeye Firearms Association Secretary from 2013-2019, and continues to serve on the Board of Directors. He is co-founder of BFA-PAC, and served as its Vice Chairman for 15 years. He is the editor of BuckeyeFirearms.org, which received the Outdoor Writers of Ohio 2013 Supporting Member Award for Best Website, and is also an NRA-certified firearms instructor.