Gun Deaths in the United States
Yet another shooting has happened in the United States of America, which undoubtedly is prompting finger-pointing, shouting, and all sorts of comments about “guns don’t kill people” and the like. Many Republicans will hold up different states and localities as evidence that guns aren’t the problem and that gun violence is more rampant in Chicago (for example). Then there would be another round of handwringing and namecalling, until the next spate of violence.
We decided to take a look at gun violence versus the quality of the gun laws that have been enacted so far. In case you’re not aware, you can get gun violence rates from the Federal Government here. That’s where we got our data.
Also, giffords.org keeps a scorecard of gun laws for the different states, from A (all recommendations for gun law reforms enacted) to F (moving the other direction, loosening gun laws). We did a quick correlation analysis between the federally-reported gun mortality rate, and compared that to what giffords.org indicated was the scorecard value for that state. What we found may surprise you. This isn’t the end of the story, but the beginning and warrants further analysis.
The first takeaway from this graph is that the worse the gun laws are rated, the higher correlation with the mortality rate. For those with an F, there’s a correlation of approximately 0.6. Note that for A through about C, there’s negative or no correlation with mortality rate. It’s important to note that correlation doesn’t mean causation. That would have to be accomplished via split testing or some other analysis (and we’ll eventually look at doing that).
Time for the second take-away: the F states. You can look them up here, but we’ll list them so you know which they are without having to click out of this blog entry. You’ll recognize these.
Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, Wyoming
You probably recognize this map below too. This is the electoral map from the 2000 House of Representatives elections. Notice that all of the states on the above list are red or gray states. Not a single blue state made the list.
So what we can gather from this is that the same correlation exists between red and blue states, if we were to break it down that way. Ultimately, what it comes down to is this: if you’re afraid of death by firearm, then your best bet is to move to a blue state, whatever Fox News tells you. Map here is from 270 to win.
Takeaways
As usual, we’re working with very small sample sizes (50 states). Since gun control is largely a state responsibility, we’re not likely to get a better sample size. Further, correlation is not causation. Just because we happen to see gun laws and the gun violence trend the same way doesn’t mean that looser gun laws cause gun deaths. There’s an element of logic here that will make some people say “but common sense…”. Common sense has limitations, and this is one.
What we’d like to explore further is that, if you look at the table graph, the states with C- gun laws tend to have less deaths than the C gun laws. This could potentially be an indicator of specific gun laws having greater impact than others. We’ll explore this in the future. For states where it’s allowed, localities may have unique combinations of gun laws that will allow us to zoom in on the ones that have been effective over others which are less necessary.
