February 20, 2018

States: Same ownership rates, big difference in murders

Sam Smith, 2016 - One of the problems with anti-gun efforts is that they steadfastly ignore other factors involved in American's tendency towards violence. Here are a couple of examples:

- Mississippi has approximately the same rate of gun ownership as New Hampshire yet has five times as many murders per capita. The same is true of Louisiana and Maine: five times as many murders per capita in Louisiana despite roughly the same rate of gun ownership.


- As this chart from School Survival indicates, the growth in school shootings is a fairly new phenomenon while guns aren't. Why is there so little discussion of other possible causes such as bad reactions to psychiatric drugs (with which many school shooters were being treated), the growth of violent video games & movies, the collapse of American culture generally and the stressful rise of test driven public education?

No comments: