Where are the guns.
This is an important question, and I have not as yet seen any geographical breakdown at the county level of gun ownership. If you can find one, let me know. Generally speaking, though, gun ownership rate is not calculated by polling, it’s back-calculated by looking at the ratios of gun suicide to total suicide.
I find this methodology a little sketchy, personally, but based on all the research I’ve read, the “suicide proxy” as it’s called is about the best anyone has to go on, and there’s been a lot of research into fine tuning it.
Based on that, the best way to get a “where are the guns” map at the county level would be to take the data from the gun suicides map, correlate it with a new “total suicide rate” map, and run the best fit relationship used in other research at a county by county level.
It wouldn’t change the results of the analysis though. The fact that the hot spots for suicide and homicide don’t overlap means that they necessarily can’t both correlate to gun ownership rates. At best, one of them can.
Based on my prior reading of the research, they probably correlate a lot better with the suicide map than the homicide map. Further reading:
Of course the final truth is trivial. If there are no guns, there are no gun murders and no gun suicides. If there are significantly fewer guns, there will be fewer gun suicides, fewer gun murders, and fewer accidental gun deaths (not analyzed in this post). That can’t be debated.
It’s also a silly thing to bother with, given that there’s no path to there from here. We are so far beyond the saturation point at which guns become “scarce” that it’s not an achievable objective. Close to half the guns in the known universe are in the hands of US citizens, and even if you were able to reduce our gun proliferation numbers by 50%, which has never been achieved anywhere without literal door to door searches, we would still have far more guns per capita than any other country in the world.
If we had a literal actual Hitler with a literal actual gestapo who had free reign to seize all guns, you still couldn’t get our gun ownership numbers in line with the rest of the world. It is an impossible objective, so here in the USA, we must deal with the motivations instead of the tools.
That is a true thing that is true, and would be true whether I loved guns or hated guns. Here’s some analysis on that:
You state “If there are significantly fewer guns, there will be fewer gun suicides, fewer gun murders, and fewer accidental gun deaths (not analyzed in this post). That can’t be debated.” While that’s a true statement, how many fewer is worthy of discussion. In the link above, we project that based on solid multivariate research often cited by the gun control community, you’d have to buy back somewhere around 80 million dollars worth of guns to save one homicide. That figure is so incredibly large purely because we have so many guns. Specifically, we have a tremendous amount of guns which aren’t being used to kill people. Which is also a true thing that is true, whether I loved guns or hated them.
