Center for American Progress Wants Rural Folks Clamoring for Gun Control, Too

When it comes to the gun debate, there is a divide between rural and urban residents that’s kind of hard to overcome. Urban centers see an awful lot of violent crime. Their newspapers and local TV news are filled with reports of murder and mayhem, making it so the folks there figure they have to do something, and there are plenty of politicians ready to tell them that the problem is the guns.

In the rural communities, it’s different. The numbers aren’t remotely the same. Plus, people grow up using guns for hunting, as well as recognizing that in many of their communities, the only deputy on duty in the middle of the night might be an hour away. They have to take care of themselves, and since that’s what their families have done for generations anyway, it’s not a big deal.

But the very anti-gun Center for American Progress thinks that rural Americans should be as freaked out about guns as folks in inner-city Chicago. Why? Because, in their view, they’re just as plagued by the problem, if not moreso.

As this false narrative continues to shape federal policy, public health experts warn that it only further stigmatizes cities—fueling bad policy approaches and reinforcing racial stereotypes—and detracts resources from addressing the growing public health crisis posed by gun violence in rural America.⁴ Research has shown that firearm mortality rates, which include both homicides and suicides, are higher in rural America than in urban areas.⁵ Furthermore, in September 2025, the Center for American Progress released an analysis of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)⁶ showing that not only is the overall firearm mortality rate higher in rural communities but also that some of the highest rates of gun homicides are in rural counties.⁷

Ignorance or misrepresentation of the problem of gun violence in rural America means policymakers have imperfect information on how best to make investments and allocate critical resources to reduce harm and prevent future gun violence. Equipped with data that underscore the prevalence of gun violence in rural America, policymakers must pursue evidence-based solutions, recognizing that gun violence is a uniquely American public health crisis that affects every community, regardless of geography or political affiliation.

In 2024, rural counties had an annualized firearm mortality rate 45 percent higher than that of large metro counties. There were 16.6 gun deaths per 100,000 residents in rural counties compared with 11.5 gun deaths per 100,000 residents in large metro counties. In fact, of the 50 U.S. counties with the highest annualized firearm mortality rates from 2021 to 2024, 32 were rural, 10 were small or medium-sized metro counties, and eight were large metro counties.

Now, they do break it down into suicides versus homicides, which is an important distinction.

Suicides in rural communities are likely to be higher, in part because gun ownership is a lot more common, which means people are more likely to use what is at hand versus some other means. However, I’ve long maintained that suicides, either with a firearm or with something else, are a mental health issue, not a gun issue.

However, they also make the claim that “some” rural communities have some of the highest homicide rates as well.

This might well be true, of course. When you only have a few hundred residents, for example, every murder tends to hit a little harder in the per capita game. It means the total numbers are still small, but as a portion of the population, it counts for more.

The thing that the folks at CAP don’t seem to get, though, is that people in rural areas simply don’t see the problem the same way as the city folk do.

For them, they’ve seen guns used to put food on the table and to keep dangerous critters away from the animals that pay the bills. They’ve seen creepy people run away with just the sight of a shotgun in Daddy’s hands. They’ve seen all the good accomplished with firearms, so when someone does something bad, they don’t blame the guns. They know better.

The anti-gunners don’t seem to get that.

They seem to think that the experiences of inner-city Chicago, where people have to jump through countless hoops to get a gun at all within legal limits and thus don’t bother, are the same as everywhere else.

Raw numbers of “gun deaths” are meaningless, as are even homicide numbers, when it comes to the gun debate, particularly with rural folks. Why? Because we don’t see the problem as the gun, and we never will.

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