Gun violence in the US, Part 2: the bad states

First, as an aside I want to point out that discussion on another site (PAGunBlog) has suggested that some of the information I am using may be flawed.  Most of this is coming a Wikipedia chart from 2010.  I guess I'm interested in pursuing it at this time because the information seems conducive to the arguments of gun rights proponents and I want to see how this will develop.  But so at any rate, I know these conclusions are dubitable beyond heuristic value.*
In the last post I claimed that gun violence may not be that bad if considered against a reasonable analog (Switerzland) where guns ownership/possession and basic social-political conditions are comparable.  That is, around 40 states have gun violence levels below the levels in Switzerland (3.84 per capita).  Although the per capita level of violence in the US is 10 firearm related deaths, that figure is arrived at by considerable (percentage-wise) deviations in the other 10 states.  Most notably, D.C. had approximately 16 firearm related death per capita.  That is at least 500% increase over most of the US.

So what are the states where firearm related murders exceeded these levels?  They are:
DC: 16.5%
Louisiana: 7.7%
Missouri: 5.4%
Maryland: 5.1%
South Carolina: 4.5%
Delaware: 4.2%
Michigan: 4.2%
Mississippi: 4.0%
Florida: 3.9%
Georgia: 3.8%
Just to be clear, it's actually only 9 states that exceed the Switzerland bar. Georgia is equal to it.

Not for gun rights proponents, it is very important that DC is at the top of this list because this is a city that has enacted serious gun control and obviously it has failed.  I think this point is probably true.  Of course, the response to this, which I think is simply intuitively persuasive (although it may not be right), is that trafficking guns from states where gun control is limited to DC is practically unenforceable.  Are you going to stop every car and search for guns?  That's a 4thA violation.

If you look at the majority of these states, you'll probably anticipate where these gun murders occur, and that is in the major metropolitan areas located in those states.  New Orleans, St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit, Miami?.

One of the things I think we can conclude in these respects is that, as onerous as some of the tragedies are that receive media attention, they are anomalous in respect of most of the US.  Most of the US doesn't have a problem with gun violence--again, assuming Switzerland is the bar for what is and is not acceptable.

Gun violence is primarily an urban problem and a problem in states with major urban areas.


* Also, I want to say that these reflections have changed some of my fundamental intuitions about both gun violence and gun control.  Before these reflections I was anti-2ndA, anti-CC and anti-OC (and then the title of this blog was Against the 2nd Amendment and the description was similar).  After these reflections I've decided that I am no longer against the 2ndA, for the most part, and do not think that gun violence in general requires its abolition.  Moreover, I'm not against CC anymore.  I don't like it, really, but I think that the licensing of CC is adequate.  I'm still against OC, but reading about the OC experiment of Caleb on Gun Nuts Media has actually given me faith that even it could be reasonable, given certain conditions.  

Gun violence in most of the US is not that bad, considered state by state

Because of my particular vocation, I've never been terribly impressed by the power of facts because I think that reason is capable of achieving many things by itself.  Moreover, science and knowledge are always produced by interested institutions and parties, who despite their best efforts cannot denude themselves of prejudices (what's more, were they able to, they would consequently be unable to know anything!).  And so I've always thought that while science and research were important, they needed to be treated very delicately, and submitted to the court of reason.

But we know, since Kant, that reason has its limits and therefore must allow empirical science to be an equal source of education for reason.

So then let's follow science and see where it leads (and then allow that reason might have questions of its own).  It has led to some disappointing outcomes at time: that humans are not the products of intelligent design; that we lack considerable knowledge about the actual nature of all that exists (i.e., dark energy and dark matter); that climate change is real and that humans are most probably the cause of it.

One of the things I'd been concerned about, in creating this blog and in engaging with others, was the prevalence of gun violence in the United States.  I had an intuition that greater regulation could do something about it.  And that intuition may not necessarily be wrong, but it needs to be examined to be determined to be so.

But first, is gun violence greater in the US than in other comparable nations?  Assuming this information I found on Wikipedia is correct (and it's taken from different sources), firearm related deaths in the US are much lower than in at least a dozen other countries, including Honduras, Columbia, South Africa and Mexico (Mexico's only slightly higher than the US). 

However, it's still much higher than most comparable nations, by which I means nations with similar political stability, standard of living, etc.--what we generally might call 1st world nations.  In the US, per capita (100,000 people) 10 people die of firearm related causes. In Honduras its 64; Mexico, 11; Switzerland (which has at least approachable levels of gun ownership and being nationally comparable (i.e. political stability, standard of living, etc.), nearly 4 persons.  

Let's say that Switzerland is actually a good base point for judgment: if that were the case, then we'd have to say that gun violence, for the most of the United States, is not extraordinary, or even especially high. In at least 40 of the U.S. states, gun violence is lower or equal per capita than in Switzerland.  That means that in the remaining 10 states gun violence is high enough that it has increased the US's per capital gun violence to levels above 2.5 times above Switzerland.  

That is a fascinating discovery and honestly one that I had not anticipated.  

In the next post I'll talk about the correlation between gun violence and gun ownership, gun laws.  There are some unexpected discoveries here as well to be had.

Jack Kingston and the NRA hate not only facts, but any research about gun violence

Facts are the life blood of the debate about gun rights and gun control.  In online sparring at several sites, I found myself presented by a lot of interesting information about guns.  What was uniform was the conviction that guns as forms of protection are important and that (mostly) no forms of regulation have ever had any effects on gun violence.  Most importantly (RP and others), gun violence primarily targets young black men.

While these individuals are convinced, the NRA is not, nor our different Congressional representatives who are blocking, and have blocked in 1996, appropriations to the CDC to study gun violence.  Pehaps some of my erstwhile online sparring partners will ask Jack Kingston of Georgia, among others, to stop and allow the research to be done.

As is a familiar refrain, Kingston justifies himself by claiming that this is research for the sake of gun confiscation.  Everything is about confiscation.