Yep and Alaskan's flying with guns absolutely won't be stopping anytime soon.
Alaska: 60% carry inside, 90% carry outside Anchorage.
Our crime is unfortunately rather high this year or I'd tout our safety; 34 homicides, it's outrageous. The APD caught all but four of them. It was a gang that was attempting to move into the state. Right now, a crap ton of folks across town are answering their doors with a gun (stems from a car robbery of an 80 year old woman's car. These gang starter folks had started a fairly large car theft ring. Anyway, she'd started her car to let it warm up, very common up here, and the gangy folks threatened her with a gun when she came out. She was on her way to church. Anchorage went completely ballistic over it, like we put out 124 more officers despite having a bit of an economic crisis due to low oil prices. The police suspect the 4 murderers they didn't catch fled the state. Either way, I suggest knocking loud and bearing gifts when visiting up here right now. Even the kids up here will shoot you in the face for trying to break in heh
Anyway, guns are a huge deterrent, and either way, as the APD says, most of the folks dying are involved in shit they shouldn't be - Alaskan's as a whole reply "serves em right then."
Related History: Alaska's love affair with guns actually started back in the gold rush days. Homesteaders were so notoriously over-protective over their "secret mine sites" that they would shoot people without question or ID. It got to the point that the traveling doctors and dentists (another odd quirk perhaps, we had whole packs of medical type folks who went out to the homesteads and Native villages rather than waiting for any customers to come to them) but they'd carry tall sticks with a white flag on them in the hopes that the miners and gold panners would hear out their sales pitch's. It didn't help in the slightest; the gold diggers were so protective they'd kill a man just for /knowing/ where their sites were. And you thought the wild west was violent.
As a result of this "secretive" history, Alaskan's by and large consider a gun to be not just a right, but a /necessity/ to protect their property. In the lower 48 a lot of folks often talk about personal safety or constitutional rights when discussing guns, up here it's almost always property protection with hunting being the second argument you'll likely hear. A local custom that our laws too reflect; in addition to the standard laws about self defense/castle doctrine kind of thing, in Alaska if you think someone might be coming onto your property to rob you, you can shoot them pretty much no questions asked. You can also shoot someone if they touch your car door handle, or stick anything in your car window (aka car jacking.) It is not only legal, but fairly /common/ to see folks walking around with a rifle hooked over their shoulder in 90% of businesses up here (less so in the big city of Anchorage obviously) - the notable exceptions being bars (where they ask you to check your gun,) and now, ironically, our military bases thanks to silly lower 48 regulations lol
How the /hell/ do you trash a Pelican on a short domestic flight?!? Those things are near indestructible... or maybe they were...
