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11 of top 14 states with “best” gun-laws fail to beat grade D jurisdictions

Simon Gibbs

I’ve been taking another look at FBI crime stats. I’m interested in how they correlate with the kind of gun-laws that the “Demand a Plan” people have been advocating for the United States. Last time I looked at this I found that, in all areas rural and urban, the middle-of-the-road mediocre gun-laws were best, but overall there was really no strong correlation. Oh and to be clear I was looking at overall violent crime, not limited to just murders or just gun-crime. My focus is on what is safest, and for once I’m allowing myself to look through an unpricipaled strictly consequentialist lens.

Removing rural areas (and Minnesota, due to missing data) from the picture hasn’t improved matters at all, take a look.

urban-crime-gun-laws-graph
FBI crime stats vs quality scores from smartgunlaws.org

The two states with D- laws (Florida and South Carolina) I’ll put aside, but looking at the 8 states with D grade laws, it’s clear that they usually have less violence than states with “better” gun laws. In fact 11 of very-top 14 states with “best” gun-laws fail to beat grade the average grade D jurisdiction, and overall it’s 11 states to 3. Those top states, by the way, include Massachusetts where a new gun law seems to have made matters worse. This is interesting because I think urban violence is something people care a lot about; and is more significant than the narrower measure of gun-homicides. Non-gun violence affects more people, though perhaps less seriously, and it is illogical to disregard the suffering of those victims if you are taking a statistical approach. It does seem that preventing access to firearms for self-defense can make violent crime worse.

Here is the league-table of jurisdiction-groupings, sorted by the strictness of gun-law:

urban-violence-table

Another interesting factoid here is that taking the “worst” 23 states – those with the least gun control – on average they have less violence than many of states with “better” gun-control laws. Gun-control does not always lead to safer or nicer places, far from it.

I don’t have much time to dedicate to this issue, I only did so tonight because the BBC had a very biased Panorama episode on it. I would like to look at this more, but it seems to me that naively making gun-laws stricter is not going to give people the safe environment they really want. It’s pretty clear that safety isn’t about taking guns away and imposing more laws. I think that to solve their gun crime problem the US has to look harder at itself.

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3 responses to “11 of top 14 states with “best” gun-laws fail to beat grade D jurisdictions”

  1. Devika Avatar
    Devika

    Interesting observation.

    One thing that stayed in my mind from the BBC panorama was to see how the US teachers are now training themselves to use guns to protect their children. Staff and children going to drills at school to prepare themselves for a scenario like that in Newtown. Although on one hand it seemed encouraging and responsible, on the other hand it seemed very disturbing to watch teachers and children as young as five preparing themselves for being attacked in circumstances like that of Newtown. Watching the whole process was somewhat uncomfortable.

    The fact is that people in the US will have to prepare themselves for such horrific scenarios regardless of whether you make gun laws stricter or provide more guns instead, and that’s the part that’s actually worrying. A reflection of a paranoid and insecure society, due to the shockingly destructive behaviors of some of its members. This society will persist with or without guns, and I don’t think that any kind of law will actually resolve that. The change needs to come from within.

    Whilst watching the programme, I kind of felt glad that I wasn’t living in the US, but what’s to say this kind of society won’t develop in the UK.

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    1. Simon Gibbs Avatar
      Simon Gibbs

      The next thing to happen on this issue, other than tragic repetition, is that a massacre is committed with a weapon made at home, be that a bomb or a firearm. At that point it should be clear that a) this can indeed happen anywhere and b) you are not going to be able to stop it, as you rightly said.

      At that point, people may have a serious go at thinking about what actually creates the monsters that come after children. Until then, people are too busy debating the finer points of whether self-defence or disarmament offers greater utility, that is, they will continue to miss the point entirely.

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  2. Paul Marks Avatar
    Paul Marks

    Let us hope that the use of both facts and reasoning (as can be seen in this article) has some effect at least on some people.

    Sadly the hard core “Progressives” will be influenced by neither facts or reasoning (they are in love, or in lust, with POWER), but some moderate “gun control” people may have second thoughts.

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