Variations in Rates of Homicide and Gun Ownership

TOM KANDO

On December 6, there was another mass shooting  in the US.  We have become so inured to such events   that we hardly pay attention to them any more. In Sacramento, rarely a week goes by without one or two people shot to death. I sometimes feel that  I live in  a twenty-first century  version of Tombstone or Dodge City.  The country experiences  more than one  mass shooting per day. No other country  comes even close to this. This is one sort of American “exceptionalism.”

As every time, the mass murder is followed by hand-wringing and endless questions about the perpetrator’s motives and mental condition. We hear, again and again, that the cause of our mass murder epidemic is mental illness, that the solution is to identify those who are dangerously mentally ill and to prevent them from acquiring  fire arms. This is  nonsense, of course. The rate of mental illness is not higher in the US than elsewhere.  I have always argued for one simple point: It’s   all about the guns. The more guns there are, the more people  die from guns. Period.

But I have yet to come across data documenting the  simple proposition that there is a strong correlation between a place’s homicide rate and its rate of gun ownership. Logic is on my side, but what about  data?

Last year, I tried to test this  hypothesis myself. I used countries as my units of analysis. My results were inconclusive. They did not show that countries with  high rates of gun ownership also had higher homicide rates.

I just   repeated my effort.  But instead  of comparing countries,  I now  compared the fifty US states. My source is  States’ gun ownership rates.

I entered the data   into  a two-by-two table with the following four categories:

             1. States with high homicide rates and high gun ownership rates

            2. States with low homicide rates and high gun rates

            3. States with high homicide rates and low gun ownership rates

            4. States with low homicide rates and low gun ownership rates

I then performed  a Chi Square test on the observed  frequencies.  Once again, my hypothesis was NOT confirmed. The numbers come as close to the null  hypothesis as possible. In other words, I found no evidence of a correlation between homicide rates and gun ownership rates, when comparing the fifty American states.

Thus, both of my attempts to show such a  relationship  failed.  Apparently, other factors outweigh that relationship: These   include regional, political, economic, cultural and  demographic differences.

I then looked at another variable which might be relevant: the rural-urban variable.   I now  compared the twenty-five most rural states  with the twenty-five most urban states. This was my independent variable. The dependent variable was now a combination of homicide rate and gun ownership rate. This produced the same four categories as mentioned above.

This time, I hit upon a very strong correlation. However, it was not the one which I had  hoped to demonstrate: 

	Rural states	Urban states	total
A.                    both homicides and guns high	11          (Cell A)	2      (Cell E)	13
B.                    guns high and homicides low	11          (Cell B)	1      (Cell F)	12
C.                    guns low and homicides high	1            (Cell C)	12    (Cell G)	13
D.                    guns low and homicides low	2            (Cell D)	10    (Cell H)	12
Total	25	25	50

 As the table  indicates, the urban-rural variable makes a very strong difference in a population’s  gun use AND gun possession.  The Chi Square which I ran on this table produced a highly significant  value of 0.0001.  What this means is that rural Americans possess far more guns (per capita) than urban Americans,. But they do not necessarily kill each other more frequently than the latter.

The vast majority of the states that own many guns are rural (Cells A and B). This includes ten Southern rural states (which are also high homicide states), but also five “cowboy” states (Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and the Dakotas),   three New England states (Vermont, Maine and New Hampshire)   and a couple of Midwestern states. Half of the high guns states - largely those that are most rural - are low homicide states (Cell B). Presumably, in these states guns are more often associated with hunting than with murder.

Conversely, the large majority of the low guns states are the more urban states. (Cells G and H)  Nevertheless, over half of the low-gun states  are among the high homicide states (Cell G).. These include five Southern urbanized states (for example Texas and Florida) three “cowboy” states (New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada) and a couple of Atlantic states. Finally, the ten  urban states which have both low gun ownership and low homicide rates include half a dozen Eastern seaboard states (New York, New Jersey, New England) and the Pacific states (California, Hawaii).

Apparently,  lifestyle matters. On a per capita basis, rural folks own far more guns than urbanites.  However, in half of the rural states this does not produce high homicide  rates.. Conversely,  half of the urban states  have a lower than average gun ownership but high homicide rates anyway.

To be sure, America’s gun problem is getting worse: In 2021, there were 48,830 guns deaths in America. This was  up from  39,700 before the onset of Covid, just two years earlier.

The gun deaths were distributed as follows: (US Mass Shootings)

26,328 suicides - 56%

20,958 murders: 43%

549 accidents

537 “legal intervention”

458 undetermined

Over 75% of all homicides and suicides occur by gun. Mass murders  make up a small part of all homicides: In 2021, they  accounted for  only 106 deaths. However, mass murders are exceptionally disturbing. And if there is any crime which occurs more often  in America than elsewhere, it is this most heinous one. Nor can I recollect a single mass murder committed by a female (although there have been female serial killers).  100% of American mass killers have been males, almost all of them white.

There are 400 million firearms in America, and the number continues to rise. What is needed is to stop and  reverse the spread of automatic firearms - these are weapons of war with no other purpose than to  kill large numbers of people  as rapidly as possible. They offer no defensive protection, nor are they useful for hunting and other forms of recreation. 

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