The Conway Daily Sun has an article on how gun ownership in New Hampshire rates to other states. The piece includes a ranking by the Gun-Grabby Gifford Law Center, ranking states by gun owners and how restrictive their gun laws.
That report also includes homicides per 100,000 for each state.
The premise behind the piece is to explore what percentage of the population owns or possesses firearms but to know these things, there would need to be a record or registry, and the last time I checked, New Hampshire was not allowed to collect or share that sort of information. I might have that wrong, and let’s assume, for the sake of this fisking, I do. But the Sun wants everyone to know that despite the perception of a concealed carry wild-west persona, a minority of Americans own a firearm.
According to a 2020 study published by the RAND Corporation, a research and public policy advocacy group, only about 32% of American households own a firearm.
The article (a reprint sourced here) also shares the Grabby Gifford Law Center data to presumably make a connection between gun ownership, gun-grabbing laws, and violent crime. Except that the data doesn’t compare violent crime. It uses firearm deaths, which probably include suicides. That’s not a proper frame of reference, but even if we accept those terms, the Gifford data contradicts its likely intent.
New Hampshire scores a gun control grade of ‘F’ with 8.3 firearms deaths per 100,000 people, but 18 states in the survey have better grades but more firearms deaths per capita. It also ignores violent and property crimes which are affected by the likelihood that a criminal will be met with equal or superior force or knowledge that they won’t.
Using the same data year (2021) as the Giffords report published in the Conway Daily Sun, Homesnacks compiled FBI crime data to generate their most recent Safest States survey, including violent and property crime.
The 10 Safest States In America For 2023 in Order – after which I have added the Giffords Gun Grab Grade.)
1 New Hampshire F
2 Maine F
3 Vermont C-
4 New Jersey A
5 Idaho F
6 Rhode Island B+
7 Virginia B
8 Connecticut A-
9 Massachusetts A-
10 Wyoming F
As we can see, there is no obvious or consistent connection between gun-grabbing laws and public safety.
If you need a better example, Illinois got an A- from the Gifford Center for lawless gun violence, but Chicago has more murder and violent crime in one year than loose-gun-law New Hampshire could have in nearly a century.
Add the remainder of the state, and Illinois ranks 25th on the Homesnacks list. (A -) but twenty-four states are safer.
It is ridiculous, but gun-grabbing has never been about safety. The driver of violence and gun violence is not firearms. As Democrat Presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. noted,
“NIH needs to research what psych drugs are doing to kids mentally – school shootings are a new phenomenon and that his school had a gun club growing up – Switzerland has the same amount of guns and hasn’t had a school shooting in 21 years. – “Something has changed in this country. It’s not the guns. We’ve always had the guns.”
That’s not to say he (RFK Jr) wouldn’t or doesn’t have some Democrat-like thoughts about disarmament, but he’s right, and the article republished in the Conway Daily Sun is just pandering to the lies without even asking any of the questions we pose here.
It’s filler, and some days you need that, but it’s contradictory. Neither gun ownership numbers nor so-called “gun safety laws” correlate to gun safety or crime.
