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You might wonder "is Concealed Carry worth it" and...well, the answer is complicated, depending on exactly how you mean "worth it."
In the most simplistic terms, having a gun and a Concealed Carry holster is about as "worth it" as a fire extinguisher...
...but it isn't that simple.
If you're wondering whether it's worth the hassle to bother with getting a permit, the carry gear and toting the gun around, we're going to try to give you a serious answer.
The short answer is that the odds you'll need it are generally low, but if you find yourself in the situation where you do...it may be the only thing that can save your life.
With that said, let's talk about what makes something "worth it" or not.
Before we get into a real answer, we need to talk about what people mean by "is concealed carry worth it.
What do you MEAN by "worth it?"
Without getting into Psych and Econ 101 simultaneously (well...we're going to a bit) there are two different ways at looking at it. You have an emotional incentive and you have a mathematical incentive.
The emotional incentive is how carrying a gun makes you feel. Does it make you feel good, safer and so on. So you have to decide if carrying makes a difference to you as far as that goes.
The mathematical incentive is the odds that you'll need to use it. In other words, the risk that you'll be faced with violent crime and therefore (god forbid) have to actually USE your gun? What is the probability that I'd ever need a gun on me?
What we are going to deal in here is the latter. Guns don't make you safe; they give you a means to confront danger, so we can to some extent generalize about how much of it is out there.
Again, we aren't psychologists. All sorts of people feel all sorts of things for different reasons, and only a garbage-tier human marginalizes others' feelings without being in their shoes.
So we can't comment on what you feel about carrying a gun or how they make you feel. What we CAN explore is what kind of risks exist and therefore make a case for concealed carry based on what happens in the real world.
To give a bit of context, here's the thing about concealed carry that makes it different from any other risk management tool:
A concealed pistol is a solution to a specific type of problem that most people rarely, if ever, encounter on a per capita basis. However, if one DOES encounter it...it's one of the only truly effective tools to solve that problem.
Police cannot get to you in time, unless one happens to be right there. They can only arrive after the fact. You may not be able to count on other people in the area either.
In other words, a concealed carry gun is worthless until it's not...but when it's not, it's almost the only thing that will work.
The old saw is "it's better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it!" It's not wrong.
So, with that said, let's address the mathematical risk. Buckle up, because this is going to get a little complex.
Your odds of needing a concealed carry gun...well, they get a bit complicated.
If we were to try and come up with a per capita risk...you'd have a very incomplete picture about crime in the United States. There are 328 million inhabitants, and per the FBI's 2019 crime data (the latest available), there were 1.204 million violent crimes.
That's less than 0.5 violent crimes per capita, meaning your overall risk of being a victim of violent crime - per our back-of-the-envelope math - is
