Thursday, October 8, 2015

Gun Laws and Homicide Rates Unrelated

Eugene Volokh writes the Volokh Conspiracy column for The Washington Post. Today he looks at the relationship, if any, between state gun laws and murders plus gun accidental deaths.

Volokh finds none. There are states with tough gun laws and low murders plus GADs and states with weak-as-water gun laws which also have low murders plus GADs, including my home state of Wyoming.

Wyoming, by the way, has some of the highest gun ownership on the planet. Many adult males own several guns and not a few women do too. Young people become gun owners and hunters in their teens. The standard greeting during autumn, asked of men and many women, "Got your elk yet?"

Likewise, Volokh finds states with both weak and tough gun laws with high murder plus GAD rates. As he notes,
The correlation between the homicide rate and Brady score in all 51 jurisdictions is +.032 (on a scale of -1 to +1), which means that states with more gun restrictions on average have very slightly higher homicide rates, though the tendency is so small as to be essentially zero.