by Michael Smolens
Amid an increase in gun violence across the nation, officials are struggling to understand why it’s happening and what to do about it.
The city of San Jose recently took a unique — and certainly controversial — step, passing an ordinance that requires most gun owners to pay fees and carry liability insurance.
San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo said he believes the new law will help reduce shootings and offset public costs of gun violence. Lower premiums for those with gun safes, trigger locks and who have completed gun safety classes are expected to incentivize safer behavior, according to CNN.
The National Association for Gun Rights quickly filed a lawsuit challenging the ordinance.
The effectiveness and legality of regulating guns have been argued over since before the famous gunfight in Tombstone, Ariz., in 1881. A new study by a group that backs gun control laws seems certain to add fuel to that debate.
The research by Everytown for Gun Safety shows a correlation between states with stronger gun laws and those with lower rates of deaths by shootings. California was determined to have the strongest gun laws and was among the states with lower rates of death by gun violence. Hawaii, which the study rated as having the second-strongest gun laws, had the lowest death rate.
Conversely, Mississippi was deemed to have the weakest gun laws and the highest rate of gun deaths.
Homicide, suicide and death from accidental shootings were included in the study using 2020 data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Researchers focused on 50 laws, ranging from those that block gun purchases by people who pose a threat to themselves or others to rules on concealed weapons. Also considered were efforts to increase police accountability, protect civil rights and target “bad actors in the gun industry.”
The study emphasized a handful of priority areas: passing background checks, blocking at-risk individuals from obtaining guns and requiring locked gun storage; also rejecting “stand your ground” laws and allowing guns to be carried without permits.
“While each of the top 14 states in the gun law rankings has all five of these policies in place, none of the bottom 14 states maintains any of these critical protections,” the study said.
The leading states on gun laws averaged 7.4 gun deaths per 100,000 residents while those at the bottom averaged 20 per 100,000. The national average is 13.6 Hawaii, which also has the lowest rate of gun ownership, had 3.4 deaths per capita. California was at 8.4 deaths — about in the middle of the states with the strongest gun laws. Mississippi had 28.6 deaths per 100,000 residents.
With some exceptions, that blue state-red state contrast is consistent throughout the study.
Overall, the correlation bears out as the average of states shows. But some individual states counter the trend. For instance, Illinois was ranked as having the sixth-strongest gun laws, yet its gun death rate was 14.1 per 100,000.
That’s higher than New Hampshire, which had a rate of 8.9 per capita, though it was ranked as having only the 42nd-strongest gun laws.
The study suggests that some strong-law states are, to a degree, victimized by neighboring states.
“Virginia, which had weak gun purchase laws until 2020, has long been the top supplier of crime guns into Maryland,” said the report, which added that “Illinois is surrounded by states with much weaker laws.”
The number of guns also can skew the laws-to-shootings correlation, according to the study.
“A state like Rhode Island has low gun violence relative to the strength of its laws — likely due in part to its very low gun ownership rate (it’s third-lowest in the nation),” the report said. “On the other hand, states like Nevada and New Mexico have higher rates of gun violence than their laws might suggest — perhaps in part as a result of above-average gun ownership.”
Is this study conclusive? The Everytown folks think so.
“When we compare the states head-to-head on the top 50 gun safety policies, a clear pattern emerges,” the study says. “States with strong laws see less gun violence.”
No doubt critics will see plenty to pick apart in the study. Nobody seems to have a good explanation for the nationwide increase in crime, particularly involving the use of guns. There may be economic, societal and pandemic-related reasons for it. Easy access to guns, illegal and legal, certainly contributes to it.
Commonsense laws like requiring locked storage for guns and tighter background checks certainly make sense. How things play out with more innovative ones, such as requiring liability insurance, will be interesting to watch.
Michael Smolens is a columnist for The San Diego Union-Tribune with a long history of political coverage.
