Saturday, July 21st, 2012
Stephan: Watching television tonight I saw yet another gun fueled massacre be reported endlessly. It was wall to wall sensoids, each dripping detail discussed over and over. There has been the usual small modicum of serious questioning of the gun laws. More pro forma than anything else. Never has the power of the NRA's minority views been more evident. Conservatives are making it harder and harder to vote, but to get a gun, many guns, armor and a gas mask in order to kill people. Not so tough.
(Please click though to see that chart, 'Number of Deaths Due to Injury by Firearms, per 100,000 Population 2008.')
This tragedy took place in Colorado a state that has a relatively low number of deaths due to firearms.
Less dramatic, but more lethal in numbers is the over all day-to-day death rate, as one might style it. Doing that reveals that Red value policies produce inferior and more dangerous social outcomes than is the case in Blue value states.
Arkansas, Louisiana Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Wyoming, Montana, Nevada and, particularly Alaska are seriously more dangerous to live in that New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts.
Will anything be done? I doubt it. And it is too late anyway. We have, by best estimate somewhere between 270 and 350 million privately held guns owned by something north of 80 million people -- about 26 per cent of the population. We are, particularly in the red value states, a lethal society. A triumph of paranoia over wellness.
Richard Florida is Co-Founder and Editor at Large at The Atlantic Cities. He's also a Senior Editor at The Atlantic and Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management.
Last night’s horror in Aurora, Colorado, once again confronts America with the senseless tragedy of gun violence. The debate over this country’s relationship to guns will start all over again, and this time, in the middle of a presidential campaign.
The map below, by my colleague Zara Matheson at the Martin Prosperity Institute, charts the geography of gun violence across the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [PDF]. The data (from 2008, the most recent year available) include accidental shootings, suicides, even acts of self-defense, as well as crimes.
There were 10.3 deaths by firearms per 100,000 people in Colorado in 2008, exactly the same as the national average. Gun deaths were highest in Alaska (20.9 per 100,000) and lowest in Hawaii (3.1 per 100,000).
Last year, I took a deeper look at the the factors associated with gun deaths at the state level.
Gun violence and drug abuse are often presumed to go together, but we found no association between illegal drug use and death from gun violence at the state level. While it is commonly assumed that mental illness or stress levels trigger gun violence, we found no association between […]
