For the sixth time since 2010, California has the strongest gun laws of all 50 states, according to the most recent annual scorecard released by the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
The center, which tracks every state’s gun legislation, published its scorecard on December 16, just days from the end of a year that saw the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history—the June 12 Pulse nightclub attack in Orlando, Florida, that claimed 49 victims. And although they often aren’t publicized widely, shootings take place in neighborhoods and communities across the country on a daily basis.
Grading the States
Seven states received “A”-range grades, while 25 states earned F’s for weak gun laws in 2016. The center assigned the 18 other states scores ranging from B-plus to D-minus. Each year, legal experts within the organization evaluate every state’s gun laws, assign grades and compare those rankings with its most recent gun death rate. The team bases its analysis on various policy solutions, ranging from the gun-violence prevention order that allows a judge to temporarily suspend individuals’ access to guns if they are viewed as posing a significant danger to public safety to submitting […]
My understanding is that gun crime and murders in urban areas are in large part gang related. For example, increases in recent gun murders in Chicago are a major chunk of those increases nationwide. Chicago and other major cities have gang problems and police problems..which to me says not much has changed. The guns are there whether laws restrict them or not. The real issue is people’s behavior. The state does what it usually does which is restrict everyone’s freedom because of the actions of a small percentage of the population as a whole. What happened to justice based on your conduct instead of what you may or may not do?
But California is hypocritical about this because it produces most of the violence porn that people everywhere consume.
If one observes ‘The Counted’ in the Guardian one sees that of 1039 Americans killed by police this year, California police killed 154, as opposed to New York police killed 24. Gun totin’ Texas ‘only’ killed 88 by police. I admire Gov Jerry Brown
but what is going on with this?
Compare this by the 2 killed by law enforcement in England.
Is it just me, or should we ALL be concerned about organizations that don’t show or source their data when making an agenda-based argument? That is what the major basis for this Newsweek article, the “Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence” (LCPGV), seems to be doing. I went to the link cited by Newsweek, and then dug deeper into the “Center”‘s website and found…nothing but pretty graphs and assertions. They don’t cite any actual numbers or sources for their contention that gun control laws correlate with decreased firearms deaths in the US.
Indeed–and ironically–several of the states with “F” grades awarded by the center (including my own gun-loving Utah) have far lower firearms homicide rates than many of the A and B states graded states (as factcheck.org notes: “The 10 states with the lowest homicide rates are: North Dakota, Vermont, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Utah, Idaho, Iowa, Maine, Massachusetts and Oregon.”– see http://www.factcheck.org/2015/10/gun-laws-deaths-and-crimes/ ). Now, Stephan is likely to come back and say “well, this is not just about gun homicides, but about gun death rates altogether”–which is true, but irrelevant.
There is some bait and switch going on in this Newsweek article and in the LCPGV analysis. In their calculations they include suicides which far outnumber homicides. Why is this bait and switch? Because the laws that these folks advocate would have NO EFFECT on suicides. If these laws worked at all, they would only impact the homicide rate–yet the firearms homicide rate is already dramatically lower than it has been since the 1950s (though you wouldn’t know it by the way the media reports it). You can see the evidence for this here: http://wp.me/p77m4w-12 But you don’t have to trust me. Here, from the Washington Post of all places, is a much more balanced article that shows the LCPGV emperor wears no clothes (and unlike the LCPGV analysis, teh WP article DOES cite its sources and data):
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2015/10/06/zero-correlation-between-state-homicide-rate-and-state-gun-laws/?utm_term=.bb42d1da9a73