Inconvenient Data: There’s No Correlation Between a State’s Gun Control Ranking and its Gun-Related Homicide Rate

The gun control group Giffords has proudly announced their latest annual scorecard for gun control laws. The scorecard gives states with more gun control laws higher grades, while lower grades go to states that don’t adopt as many gun laws. The scores are then listed next to each state’s “gun death” rate, with Giffords claiming a correlation between the two. In other words, the higher a state’s Giffords grade, the lower the “gun death” rate tends to be.

Everytown has a very similar grading system, though they provide states a ranking rather than a letter grade.

If the policies backed by Giffords and Everytown actually worked as promised, we should expect to see a strong correlation between a state’s grade or ranking and its gun-related homicide rate. Additionally, states that have increased their gun control laws in recent years should see a corresponding reduction in their homicide rate.

Neither has occurred. A very basic statistical analysis reveals that gun control rankings don’t have any significant correlation with the rate of gun-related homicide in a given state. And while lacking a correlation isn’t dispositive on its own, several states that have adopted stricter gun laws and thus improved their gun control rankings have not seen corresponding improvements in their gun-related homicide rates.

I’m not the first to cover this topic, as Handwaving Freakoutery had a great article on it a few years ago, though that one was focused on gun ownership rates compared to homicide rates. With updated data and gun control scorecards, we can look at this from another angle.

The misleading “gun death rate” measure

Before proceeding to a discussion of homicide, we first need to dispense with what the gun control groups use as their metric of success, the “gun death rate” (Everytown calls it a “gun violence rate”).

This is simply a measure of gun-related deaths in any category, including homicides, suicides, unintentional and negligent deaths, and those of unknown causes. In 2023, the most recent year for which the CDC provides complete data through its “Wonder” tool, the United States recorded 46,751 gun-related deaths. Of those, 27,308 were suicides compared to 17,941 homicides.

In terms of percentage rates, suicides made up 58.4% of our gun-related deaths in 2023, with homicides accounting for 38.4%. The remaining balance of about 3.2% is a mix of unintentional deaths (458), law enforcement shootings (608), and gun-related deaths of undetermined causes (436).

“Gun death rate” is therefore more a measure of gun-related suicides than it is homicides. But most of the gun control policies Everytown and Giffords support have nothing to do with suicide, as most suicidal people will pass a background check, they don’t need a carry permit to have a gun in the home, and laws restricting certain rifles or magazines obviously make no difference to self-harm. Even the most inoffensive gun imaginable to gun control advocates, something like a double-barrel shotgun, would obviously be more than enough to carry out a suicide.

I won’t go on at length about why using suicide data is misleading, because I wrote an article on that topic and I encourage you to read it if you haven’t already. Suffice it to say that when people colloquially discuss “gun violence,” they mean criminal violence using guns, not self-harm. Gun-related homicide is the primary problem most proposed gun control laws claim to help solve, so it’s the relevant metric in this analysis.

There is no statistically significant correlation between a state’s gun control ranking and its gun-related homicide rate.

Creating a chart to see whether or not there is a correlation between the level of gun control in a given state and its gun-related homicide rate is pretty straightforward. We’ll use Everytown’s ranking system as the basis of comparison for simplicity. The X axis of our chart will proceed from “best” to “worst” in terms of gun law strength, according to Everytown.

While Giffords has its own grading system, the two lists are extremely similar. For example, California gets an “A” from Giffords, and is also ranked #1 by Everytown, while Arkansas gets an “F” from Giffords, and is ranked last out of 50 by Everytown. The Everytown rankings thus correspond very closely to Giffords’ grades.

For the Y axis, I’ll use the CDC’s most recent gun-related homicide data for 2023 in each of the 50 states. If gun control laws generally work to reduce gun-related homicide, we should expect to see a consistent increase in homicide the further down the Everytown ranking we get, as states with less gun control should see more gun-related homicide.

The result we actually get is this:

To quote Handwaving Freakoutery, who generated a similar chart for his article, “this looks less like data and more like someone shot a piece of graph paper with #8 birdshot.”

The calculation tool I used explains that the most Everytown can claim is a “non-significant small positive relationship” between a given state’s gun control ranking and its gun-related homicide rate. The Pearson correlation coefficient of r=0.2279 is firmly within the “weak” category:

Amusingly, while arguing that Illinois is corrupted by nearby pro-gun states, Everytown also argues that the pro-gun state of New Hampshire has a low rate of violence because it’s shielded by its neighboring antigun states. But why wouldn’t the opposite be true? Why wouldn’t the lax gun laws of New Hampshire hurt Massachusetts or Vermont, as Everytown claims happens to Illinois? That’s left unexplained for some reason.

Another excuse Everytown makes is that “it takes time for new laws to have an impact.” Citing the examples of newly-enacted gun control laws in New Mexico and Nevada, it argues that the new policies have simply not had time to take effect yet. On the other end of the spectrum, Everytown claims Iowa will soon become more violent thanks to it loosening its gun laws.

But this excuse is puzzling, too. An archived version of Everytown’s 2022 rankings had New Mexico at #16. Now the Land of Enchantment is…still at #16. How many years does Everytown expect us to wait to see results from the laws it claims make a difference?

In addition, the January 21, 2022 archived webpage for New Mexico’s 2022 ranking with Everytown says that “the state can hope to see reductions in gun violence as its new laws’ impact come into view.” Everytown uses the exact same sentence three years later in its most recent rankings for New Mexico. Hope dies last, I suppose.

But I’ve picked on Everytown enough in this article. It’s time for Giffords to have a turn. Giffords makes a longer-term comparison easier, as they have published their grading system since 2013. That year, this was the map:

A number of states have increased their grades with Giffords by adopting various gun control laws in the last decade, but that has generally hasn’t led to lower gun homicide rates. Colorado is a good example.

In its first ever gun laws scorecard in 2013, Giffords gave Colorado a “C.” That year, Colorado’s gun-related homicide rate was 2.0 per 100,000. By 2023, Colorado had adopted many more gun control laws and improved its Giffords score all the way up to an “A-.” Its gun homicide rate, however, was 4.5 per 100,000 in 2023, more than double what it was in 2013.

Washington and Oregon followed similar patterns. They were rated as “C” and “D+” respectively by Giffords in 2013, but today their grades have both risen to an “A-.” Unfortunately, just like Colorado, both states have seen their gun-related homicide rates more than double, even as they adopted more and more gun control laws and improved their Giffords scores.

Several other examples exist among states that enacted more gun control measures in the last decade. To be sure, the country as a whole saw homicide rates increase, especially following the pandemic lockdowns and the George Floyd riots of 2020. While the national rate didn’t double as it did in the states discussed above, it increased from 3.5 per 100,000 in 2020 to 5.4 per 100,000 in 2023, so perhaps Giffords can blame some of the increased violence in their favored states on national trends.

But if passing more gun laws only results in a state following larger national trends, what’s the point of passing those laws? The whole appeal of the gun control industry’s argument for more restrictions is that by adopting ever more gun control laws, states can lower their gun-related homicide rates relative to the nation as a whole. But the evidence doesn’t support that premise, whether looking for correlation among the 50 states or looking more anecdotally at individual states that have more recently adopted stricter gun laws.

Conclusion

The gun control orgs will always have excuses ready for why gun laws didn’t achieve the promised results. National trends, unique circumstances, permissive neighboring states, the argument that “it would have been even worse” if not for the new law, yadda, yadda, yadda.

But at some point, it’s time to put up or shut up. Many of the gun control laws Giffords and Everytown back are plainly unconstitutional. But even if we set that aside and just look at their efficacy in a vacuum, they haven’t held up their end of the bargain. How long do we have to wait to see the positive results they claim?

Politicians who have passed such laws have a responsibility to track their effectiveness. When the promised improvements don’t materialize, they should repeal those laws and remove the burdens on Second Amendment rights they’ve put in place.

If gun control proponents can’t demonstrate their favored laws actually work, they shouldn’t get to keep them. If such laws remain in place, then it becomes clear that the true goal of gun control is unrelated to reducing crime. It’s really all about harassing law-abiding gun owners.

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. Please also consider becoming a member of CRPA or making a donation.

Konstadinos Moros is an Associate Attorney with Michel & Associates, a law firm in Long Beach that regularly represents the California Rifle & Pistol Association (CRPA) in its litigation efforts to restore the Second Amendment in California. You can find him on his Twitter handle @MorosKostas. To donate to CRPA or become a member, visit https://crpa.org/.

This post was adapted by SNW from a tweet posted by Konstadinos Moros.