The US federal government has few laws that regulate guns. Some states regulate guns lightly or not at all. The most lenient allow individuals to openly carry a firearm in public. Other states allow “concealed carry” only. States with the strictest gun laws may require people to pass a background check and undergo training before purchasing a gun.
The World Population Review (WPR) grades states on how strict their gun laws are, with the most restrictive assigned an ‘A’ or ‘A-’ and the least restrictive assigned an ‘F’.
The FBI's Crime Data Explorer (CDE) is an interactive tool that helps the public and law enforcement use and understand the massive amounts of crime data the FBI collects every year. For example, the CDE allows the public to query, view, and download data about crime, such as state homicide rates over a certain period of time. Which I did - specifically, looking at homicide rates for states with the most and least restrictive gun laws in the US, at least according to the World Population Review’s 2022 grade report.
And this is what I found. First, the Most Restrictive states (assigned an A or A- by WPR):
Okay, pretty low - except for Maryland and Illinois. Now for the Least Restrictive states (the ‘F’ states), starting with those in the South::
What a contrast. It looks like strict gun laws really make a difference. How about the non-southern states that also got F’s on gun control:
Mmmm, the Least Restrictive non-southern states have much lower homicide rates than in the Least Restrictive southern states. Even more interesting: the average homicide rate across the Least Restrictive non-southern states was actually lower than the average in the Most Restrictive states. Meaning that this group of F-graded states had lower homicide rates - on average - than the A-graded states.
Specifically, the average homicide rate in the Most Restrictive states over the period of 2010-2020 was 4.6 homicide per 100,000 population. For the Least Restrictive non-southern states, the average homicide rate for 2010-2020 was 3.8 per 100,000, and for the Least Restrictive southern states it was 7.3 per 100,000. What’s going on here?
There is something special going on in the South: Maryland is in the Most Restrictive group but is a southern state with relatively high homicide rate. And while Missouri is classified as a Midwest state by the feds, the state is viewed as belonging to both the Midwest and the South by the people who live there.
It also appears that homicide rates in mostly rural states tends to be lower than in more densely populated states. However, suicide rates are much higher in rural areas than in urban areas, which explains why rural states suffer such high rates of “gun deaths”.