January 2024 - For those of you who may turn on Fox News or listen to right-wing talk radio occasionally, you're probably aware that it's become fashionable for those media outlets to try and scare Citizens into thinking there's an epidemic of gun violence in large American cities today. Chicago, in particular, seems to be a favorite whipping boy of the far right crowd.

Not only do those right-wing media outlets try to scare you, they then like to try and draw conclusions about gun violence, which always seem to match their favorite talking points. Specifically, they like to argue that, because many urban areas have more gun regulations than other parts of the country, it must be true that gun regulations don't work.

For those who believe that argument, it may come as a surprise, then, that recent gun violence statistics overwhelmingly show that the highest rates of deadly gun violence occur in the South and other Republican leaning states, most of whom promote themselves as having less stringent gun regulations than many urban areas.

For purposes of this article, we're not going to get into that discussion today. (But do see our article "The Conversation America Needs to Have on Guns" for some of our thoughts on the topic of gun regulation.) Nor are we going to discuss the possible causes for one jurisdiction to have higher per capita gun deaths than another. What we are going to do, though, is to provide some statistics for you to consider and to give us your thoughts on.

Let's start with some numbers out of Chicago. Newsweek recently analyzed Chicago's 2022 crime data and calculated that the city had a firearm death rate of about 25.82 for every 100,000 Citizens. In the absence of statistics from other jurisdictions, though, we can't say if that number is high, low, or average.

So let's turn to a study of firearm death rates by state, which was compiled by the Violence Policy Center (VPC) using 2021 crime data. Here are the twelve states with the highest 2021 gun death rates, also per 100,000 Citizens. We've inserted the Chicago number into the VPC results to provide some context:

1. Mississippi..... 32.61

2. Louisiana....... 28.42

3. N.Mexico....... 27.32

4. Wyoming....... 26.78

5. Alabama........ 26.09

------ Chicago ------ 25.82

6. Montana........ 25.36

7. Alaska........... 24.84

8. Arkansas....... 23.07

9. Missouri........ 22.92

10. Tennessee... 22.49

11. S. Carolina.. 21.89

12. Kentucky..... 21.00

For what it's worth, eleven of those twelve states have Republican legislatures and regularly vote for the GOP candidate in Presidential elections. Only three of those states have Democratic Governors and one of those three, Louisiana, elected a Republican Governor last month to replace term-limited Democrat (and one of our favorite pro-gun Democrats) John Bel Edwards.

You may be wondering what states had the lowest gun death rates in 2021. Here are those top twelve, per the VPC study:

1) Massachusetts... 3.54

2) Hawaii.............. 4.93

3) New Jersey....... 5.13

4) New York...........5.43

5) Rhode Island......5.84

6) Connecticut....... 6.88

7) New Hampshire. 8.86

8) California.......... 9.11

9) Minnesota....... 10.04

10) Nebraska....... 10.18

11) Iowa............. 11.40

12) Washington... 11.58

Nine of those states have Democratic legislatures and Democratic governors and ten of those states regularly vote for the Democratic candidate in Presidential elections.

As we said earlier, we're not going to get into an analysis today of what these numbers may mean from a policy perspective, other than to re-iterate our position that we must do more to keep guns out of the hands of those who shouldn't have them. But for those of you who like arguing that Chicago is proof that tighter gun restrictions don't work, you'd better be careful because the numbers above could easily be used to flip that script on you.

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