While the establishment media was having a field day with the declaration by Biden administration Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy that “gun violence” is a “public health crisis,” and the Giffords gun prohibition lobbying group was making the most of it at Newsweek, there was just one problem: Numbers.
Buried in the Newsweek article, which quoted Giffords stating it has long “advocated for a public health approach to gun violence,” was this observation:
“The 10 states with the strongest gun laws, in ranking order, were California, New Jersey, Connecticut, Illinois, New York, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland and Colorado. The states with the least stringent gun laws were Wyoming, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, Idaho, Montana, Mississippi, South Dakota, Kansas and Arizona.
“The report gave California the highest ranking for gun law strictness, citing strengthened concealed carry laws and $3 million of investment in gun violence research, among other reasons.”
But a check with some other sources revealed that in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, California reported the highest number of homicides in the country—2,206 according to the state Department of Justice—with a moderate percentage of gun ownership: 28.3 percent, according to data posted by Statista and the World Population Review.
New Jersey posted 254 murders, yet the state has only a 14.7 percent rate of gun ownership.
Illinois reported 881 homicides that year, with a 27.8 percent rate of gun ownership, followed by New York, with 762 slayings and a 19.9 percent gun ownership rate.
Maryland reported 511 murders, and then state has a 30.2 percent gun ownership rate, according to the World Population Review.
Connecticut posted 136 slayings, with 23.6 percent of residents owning guns, while Massachusetts logged 148 killings and 14.7 percent of the population owning guns.
If strict gun control worked, including reducing the number of gun owners, none of these states should be racking up these kinds of body counts. Nobody seems interested in broaching that subject.
There are outliers, including Texas, where 2,020 people were murdered in 2022, and there is a 45.7 percent rate of gun ownership.
But the Giffords group pointed to the bottom ten states with the weakest gun laws, as though they had a problem. The numbers tell a different story, and ironically, Texas is not at the bottom of the list. The Newsweek article includes a map of the U.S. and Texas is listed as Number 31 out of 50 for strength of gun laws.
Montana, which has the highest rate of gun ownership of any state at 66.3 percent, reported 49 homicides in 2022, according to the Statista data. Wyoming, where 66.2 percent of the residents have a gun, reported a paltry 14 slayings that year. Idaho is another state with lots of guns—60.1 percent of the population is armed—and not many murders: 53 in 2022. Yet in none of those states are the streets, or even the unpaved roads, awash in the blood of murder victims.
Indeed, according to the popular website Heyjackass.com, which monitors Chicago homicides, in 2022 the Windy City logged 738 murders of which 666 involved firearms. That is more than the combined totals Arizona, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming, with two other states listed for weak gun laws—Kansas (126) and South Dakota (39)—thrown in for good measure.
Arizona, which has a 46.3 percent gun ownership rate, posted 456 homicides in 2022.
It should be noted that all of the states at the bottom of the Giffords list for “weak” gun laws are “Constitutional Carry” states.
As quoted by Newsweek, former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords stated, “I have seen firsthand how shootings are a major threat to Americans’ lives and well-being, and our leaders must view the problem as the public health crisis it is. There are many powerful forces who downplay the threat of gun violence because the status quo benefits them financially or politically, and I’m grateful that Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy had the courage to do what he knows is best for our nation’s health.”
It’s not “downplaying” gun-related violence but rather putting it into perspective. Strong gun control laws, as illustrated above, do not translate to lower body counts. Neither do lower rates of gun ownership. The gun ban lobby avoids addressing this conundrum, because it does not follow their narrative. If stricter gun laws worked, along with a lower percentage of people with guns, the number—not the rate—of murders should go down.
Alan Gottlieb, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, responded to Murthy’s declaration about “gun violence” with some remarks of his own.
“Dr. Murthy is simply Joe Biden’s mouthpiece,” Gottlieb observed. “The real crisis in America is the failed policies of the Biden administration. Instead of focusing on locking up felons and disarming criminal gangs, he wants to disarm millions of honest gun owners whose only crime is that we exercise our right to keep and bear arms.”
CCRKBA has some 650,000 members and supporters across the country and is one of the nation’s leading grassroots gun rights organizations. Gottlieb said the real problem with violent crime in this country is that it is a “symptom of failed leadership.”
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About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
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