The National Rifle Association (NRA) and its allies in Congress frequently claim that gun violence is highest in places with the toughest crime laws. But a new study
from the Center for American Progress (CAP) suggests something closer
to the opposite is true — the states with laxer gun laws tend to be the
ones contributing the highest shares of national gun deaths and
injuries.
The authors of the report, called “America Under The Gun,”
developed a list of ten indices of gun violence, ranging from gun
homicide levels to firearm assaults to crime gun export rate (the number
of guns sold in that state used in crimes around the country), and
ranked each state from 1-50 along each index. They then took the average
of each state’s ranking to determine its overall level of gun violence
relative to other states. Lousiana was the highest, with an average of
fifth-worst across all ten indices, while Hawaii’s 45.4 ranking was the
best.
A statistical regression comparing these rankings with strength of
gun law found a correlation between weak gun laws and violence levels as
measured by the 10-index average. Comparing a state’s relative ranking
in strength of gun law (as judged by the Law Center to Prevent Gun
Violence) to a state’s relative gun violence ranking yielded clear
evidence that states with looser gun laws contributed more to the
national gun violence epidemic:
Read on...
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