How Likely Are Your Gun Owners To Shoot Somebody

Violent Crime Offenses Rate per 100k divided by % of Households with Loaded Firearm

Created by: Ikantski

Categories:

Law Enforcement, Courts, and Prisons

Map
Table

Rank	Region	Violent Crime Offenses Rate per 100k	÷	% of Households with Loaded Firearm	Result
1	District of Columbia	1,414.30	÷	1.90	744.37
2	Massachusetts	431.50	÷	1.00	431.50
3	New Jersey	329.30	÷	1.20	274.42
4	Illinois	533.20	÷	2.20	242.36
5	New York	414.10	÷	1.80	230.06
6	Hawaii	272.80	÷	1.20	227.33
7	Maryland	641.90	÷	3.60	178.31
8	Delaware	689.20	÷	4.60	149.83
9	Connecticut	256.00	÷	1.80	142.22
10	Iowa	294.70	÷	2.10	140.33
11	Michigan	536.00	÷	4.00	134.00
12	Nevada	750.60	÷	5.90	127.22
13	Rhode Island	227.30	÷	1.80	126.28
14	Ohio	343.20	÷	2.90	118.34
15	Florida	722.60	÷	6.50	111.17
16	Minnesota	288.70	÷	2.70	106.93
17	Pennsylvania	416.50	÷	4.00	104.13
18	Wisconsin	290.90	÷	2.80	103.89
19	Nebraska	302.40	÷	3.20	94.50
20	South Carolina	788.30	÷	8.90	88.57
21	New Mexico	664.20	÷	7.50	88.56
22	Colorado	347.80	÷	4.00	86.95
23	Kansas	452.70	÷	5.50	82.31
24	Tennessee	753.30	÷	9.70	77.66
25	Louisiana	729.50	÷	10.00	72.95
26	Missouri	504.90	÷	7.10	71.11
27	Arizona	482.70	÷	7.10	67.99
28	Washington	333.10	÷	5.00	66.62
29	Maine	118.00	÷	1.80	65.56
30	Texas	510.60	÷	8.10	63.04
31	Alaska	661.20	÷	10.70	61.79
32	North Carolina	466.40	÷	7.70	60.57
33	North Dakota	142.40	÷	2.40	59.33
34	Oklahoma	499.60	÷	8.90	56.13
35	Utah	234.80	÷	4.30	54.60
36	New Hampshire	137.30	÷	2.80	49.04
37	Georgia	493.20	÷	10.30	47.88
38	Oregon	287.60	÷	6.10	47.15
39	Arkansas	529.40	÷	11.60	45.64
40	South Dakota	169.20	÷	3.80	44.53
41	West Virginia	275.20	÷	6.40	43.00
42	Virginia	269.70	÷	6.30	42.81
43	Indiana	333.60	÷	7.80	42.77
44	Vermont	124.30	÷	3.20	38.84
45	Alabama	448.00	÷	13.40	33.43
46	Kentucky	295.00	÷	9.60	30.73
47	Idaho	239.40	÷	9.10	26.31
48	Mississippi	291.30	÷	11.10	26.24
49	Montana	287.50	÷	11.10	25.90
50	Wyoming	239.30	÷	9.40	25.46

Comments

Jesse Woodruff (7 months ago)

This is just dis-information. Violent crime statistics "...include murders and non-negligent manslaughter, forcible rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults"

This says nothing about shootings or guns. A violent crime does not have to involve a gun. Even a murder or non-negligent manslaughter can be comitted without a gun.

Further, dividing this rate by the % of households that have firearms is simply irrelevant. There is no data tying the violent crime statistics to the households with firearms study. The number that results from this equation is meaningless.

I will also say neither of these reports includes the methodology used to gather this data. What's the margin of error? What's the sample size? How were people contacted? Without any way of knowing these important details, these numbers may as well have been pulled out of thin air.

This site is dangerous. More details about these studies must be given so readers can gauge the validity and accuracy of the statistics. Allowing people to combine random, unconnected and dis-similar data is also mostly meaningless.

Pat Gunn (7 months ago)

More details about the studies would indeed be welcome, but allowing people to connect different studies is not necessarily mostly meaningless - people will need to take care in how they understand the ties, but they may reveal interesting things (the fact that they may make some uncomfortable does not mean we should dismiss them).

What if we imagined a stronger version of this study, which definitively showed that high levels of gun ownership and high levels of crime run together? If that is true, there are several things it could mean, and if you are very pro-gun-rights, you might still say that "it is worth it" if we were to imagine an interpretation that guns cause crime. Alternatively, you might prefer to interpret it to note that people can tell when they're in an area with dangerous culture and they feel the need to self-defense.

Discussions with hard data tend to be a lot more interesting than those without.

Anonymous (7 months ago)

This study actually shows that more guns create safer state.

Look at worst states - NY and IL are among them. FL, TX and other states with high concentration of runs have much better ratio.

For odd cases like NV - we will need to see more kinds of data

rainsford (5 months ago)

The study does not show that at all, even your example is wrong. Illinois (533.2) has a violent crime rate very close to Texas (510.6), while Florida (722.6) has a considerably higher crime rate than both. New York (414.1) is much safer than either of the high gun ownership states.

The ratio is not a measure of safety, the amount of violent crime is a measure of safety...the ratio is simply an attempt to measure violent crime in relation to gun ownership. But the ratio is meaningless by itself, having a low ratio isn't inherently "good", it needs to be associated with a crime rate to mean anything. And when you do that, you should find that there is virtually no relation between ratio and crime rate. "Bad" (ie, high) ratio states are just as likely to be safe as they are dangerous, and "good" (ie, low) ratio states are just as likely to be incredibly unsafe as they are to be safe.

The problem with the logic of this comparison is that the ratio is an attempt to prove a point about guns while the ratio is itself improved by increasing the percentage of gun ownership. States with higher gun ownership would naturally have a "better" ratio, since the having more guns improves the ratio all by itself, even if the violent crime rate stayed exactly the same.