A few days after the most recent “mass shooting” (gang shooting) in Sacramento, the subject matter non-experts who comprise the mysteriously anonymous “Sacramento Bee Editorial Board” published an opinion piece in which they claim to use “common sense” to counter the assertion made by gun rights activists, such as myself, who constantly point to the plethora of “gun violence” in California as evidence that California’s over abundance of gun control laws do not make society safer.
Unlike the Sacramento Bee Editorial Board, as a retired Sacramento County deputy sheriff, I am a subject matter expert in both firearms and crime. In fact, I am a court recognized firearms expert, and as the members of the editorial board would easily be able to confirm, I am also a past victim of “gun violence.”*
Getting to the point of this piece, the editorial board states “The correlation between the availability of guns and the incidence of gun violence is as strong as common sense would predict. Laws that make guns less accessible therefore tend to diminish the likelihood that people will be hurt and killed by them. Gun violence, in short, is a policy problem, and local, state and national policymakers can still do more to prevent shootings.”
“Gun Violence”
They refer to a “gun violence” study by Stanford researchers that was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine which, if the editorial board is representing it accurately (the link provided in the article would not work for me), claims “Californians living with handgun owners were nearly three times as likely to be killed with a gun.” Many past similar studies have made the same claim, but the problem is those studies are based on flawed statistics.
All of those studies look at deaths by firearm, without taking into account anything other than the cause of death. Those deaths include homicides, suicides, accidental shootings and even self-defense shootings.
I feel pretty safe in saying that most Americans, aside from those who have dirt on the Clintons, are not worried about getting suicided as they walk down the street. Similarly, most do not fear being a victim of a random, accidental gun death. What they do fear is being assaulted by a violent criminal armed with a gun.
By conflating the statistics of all gun deaths into that catch all phrase of “gun violence” the editorial board misleads the readers and make them think they are at a much higher risk of being murdered by someone with a gun.
Common sense, or a lack thereof
So, let me dismantle their “common sense” claims using two simple, readily available pieces of data: 1) gun ownership rates by state, and 2) gun murder rate per state (not “gun violence death” used by gun control proponents). I will look at several states, to include the two in which I have lived in, California and Idaho. Seeing as the editorial board threw Wyoming under the bus as a negative example, I will also examine them.
Gun ownership per capita by state (April 2020).
– CA ranked 43 – 28.3% of adults in CA have a gun in their home
– ID ranked 4 – 60.1% of Idaho adults have guns in their homes
– WY ranked 2 – 66.2% of Wyoming adults have guns in their homes
“Gun Violence” rate, or specifically gun deaths per capita by state in 2019 (includes suicides and self-defense shootings which it should not – this is the number liberal, anti-gun newspapers and researchers use).
- California – 7.9 deaths per 1000
- Idaho – 16.4 deaths per 1000
- Wyoming – 18.8 deaths per 1000
Homicides per capita where a gun was used in 2019 (this is the number they should be looking at) from the FBI Uniform Crime Report
- California – 1,142 gun murders, for a rate of 0.028 per 1000
- Idaho – 16 gun murders, for a rate of 0.008 per 1000
- Wyoming – 9 gun murders, for a rate of 0.015 per 1000
If the editorials board’s assertion, that more guns means more gun murders, were remotely accurate, Idaho and Wyoming, who both own more than twice the number of guns per person than California does, should have more than two times the gun murder rate, but that is not remotely true. In fact it is the exact opposite. California’s gun homicide rate is 3.5 times that of Idaho and 1.9 times that of Wyoming.
So, as we (the gun rights advocates) have previously, repeatedly stated, more gun laws do not in fact make you safer. As we often say, it would actually appear to be the opposite, because, as the gun homicide rates show, states with far more lax gun laws are actually safer.
The rest of their opinion piece is nothing more than typewritten hand wringing about needing new and more onerous infringements on the rights of law abiding gun owners, like more gun specific taxes and outlawing more guns. All of which would have done absolutely nothing to have prevented the mass shooting that prompted their article in the first place, seeing as none of the suspects were legally allowed to have guns, and the guns they did have were already illegal. Quite honestly, the entire opinion piece is exactly what I would expect to come from a group of people who dislike guns. It is called confirmation bias, and is what one should expect from people who are unwilling to step out of their own comfort bubble.
* “gun violence” – I put this phrase in quotes because it is a very misleading, catchall phrase used by those who oppose private firearms ownership.
