California has the strictest gun control laws in the country – and Golden State gun grabbers are quite proud of the fact. They also like to tout their below-average per capita firearms murder rate when compared to the nation as a whole. Gov. Gavin Newsom, on June 8, jabbed at Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves on Twitter about the gun violence rates of their respective states and announced his proposal for a 28th Amendment to the US Constitution with the intent of binding the entire nation to his brand of “common sense.”
But don’t let the governor’s slick performance or per capita numbers fool you – California is no murder-free utopia of peace and love. The truth is, gun control doesn’t protect the law-abiding citizen, and California’s firearm homicides prove it.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
While the true origin of the phrase “lies, damned lies, and statistics” is – perhaps appropriately – hard to accurately attribute, it reveals an important truth about statistical arguments. No matter what side one takes, there’s sure to be some statistic to back it up.
Advocates of gun control point to the Golden State and say that, since the per capita firearm murder rate is lower than the national average, clearly California-style gun control works. But there are other factors to consider when examining these laws’ success or lack thereof.
“More than 17 percent of the annual firearm murders in the United States occur in gun-controlled California,” Breitbart’s Second Amendment columnist AWR Hawkins recently wrote.
According to the CDC, 2021 saw 3,576 firearm homicides in California – the second highest state total, behind Texas – and 20,958 in the nation. California is the most populous state, it’s true, but that means that less than 12% of the nation’s total population accounts for 17% of gun deaths – despite also having the most gun control. The Golden State also has more school shootings than any other in the Union, a total of 169 since 1970, with Texas coming in second at 135. Furthermore, according to the FBI, California also took first place in “active shooter incidents” in 2021.
Per Capita Rates – Useful, but Potentially Deceiving
In a Twitter tiff with Reeves, Newsom said:
“Can’t wait for you to defend the fact that Mississippi has the highest gun violence death rate in the nation …
“(377% higher than California’s by the way)
“You can’t be serious.”
Gavin Newsom (Photo by Hans Gutknecht/MediaNews Group/Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)
What Newsom is referring to, of course, is the firearm homicide rate per capita – or per 100,000 people. It’s a form of measurement weighted to account for population differences, as logic suggests a higher population means higher rates of, well, pretty much every human behavior. To some degree, that’s true. But compare two lists of the states side by side, one ranked by either murders per capita or the raw total and the other by population, and that theory quickly falls apart. Simply put, there are more factors contributing to most human behavioral trends than merely how many people happen to be around.
Using the anti-gun Everytown for Gun Safety’s gun law rankings, one can select two states to compare. A look at California and Mississippi seems to back Newsom’s play: California is ranked #1 in the nation, with a gun law strength score of 86.5 and a per capita gun homicide rate of 9. Mississippi comes in dead last at #50 in gun law strength, with a score of just three and a per capita firearm homicide rate of 33.9.
What neither Newsom nor the good folks at Everytown want to discuss, however, is how many people lost their lives in each state. In 2021 – the worst year on record for firearm homicides nationwide, according to the CDC – Mississippi lost 962 people to California’s 3,576.
Here’s another, perhaps more extreme example that demonstrates how per capita rates can be deceiving. Arkansas – this writer’s home state – comes in at #49, according to Everytown. For 2021, the Natural State receives just a 4.5 gun law strength score and rocks a murder rate of 23.3. After compiling the 2014-2021 data for both California and Arkansas using the CDC’s interactive map, it’s clear that all eight years of Arkansas murders combined don’t add up to even the two lightest years in California.
The problem, of course, is simple dilution, and nowhere is that more apparent than when comparing small towns to big cities. Along the Caddo River in southwest Arkansas sits the city of Glenwood, population 2,036. The city-data.com crime tracking table shows total crimes for Glenwood from 2007 to 2020. In that whole 14-year span, there were a whopping two murders – one of which didn’t even involve a firearm. Over the same period, Los Angeles saw 4,214. The average annual count in the much larger city ranged from 251 to 395 and averaged out at 301.
(Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
But the per capita rate ranged from 6.4 to 10.2 and averaged 7.7. Now compare that to Glenwood’s 44.5 in 2007 when a single teen was shot under mysterious circumstances (it remains unsolved to this day) and 47.5 in 2018 when one local man stabbed another during a heated argument that turned violent. That small-town per capita rate looks quite intimidating – perhaps more so, with the unsolved murder – but where would you have felt safer during those 14 years?
Where Gun Control Fails
If gun control really worked, California wouldn’t lead the nation in active shooter incidents, school shootings, and come in second in total firearm homicides while also boasting the nation’s strictest laws. Put simply, gun control fails because violent criminals don’t balk at petty crimes like illegally acquiring or possessing something.
Despite what anti-gun Democrats like to say about common sense, they fail to see the actual sense in the words of criminologist Cesare Beccaria, later quoted by Thomas Jefferson in Commonplace Book: “The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes … Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.”
