The problem with any list of “best” anything is that it’s going to be horrifically subjective. I could write a piece about the best AR-15s, and you will, without a doubt, disagree with at least some of my rankings, if not all of them. That’s because the criteria I use to determine which is best and that you would use are different.
But, if at all possible, one shouldn’t use blatantly biased criteria to put together a list of something like, oh…I don’t know…say…best places to live? I mean, what I consider a good place to live and what Gabby Giffords considers a good place to live are definitely going to diverge on the issue of gun control, right?
Which is why a list on just that topic published by CNBC has a lot of people shaking their heads.
CNBC sounds like a business channel, but it’s really just another liberal channel. When it thinks about the best “states for business,” they’re matching that with what they call “quality of life.” Some measures – health care, crime – make nonpartisan sense, but CNBC adds grades for “inclusiveness,” “protections” against discrimination, anti-gun “reforms,” and naturally, “reproductive rights.”
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In Maine, the Giffords gun controllers are the experts:
After a horrific mass shooting spree in 2023 in Lewiston that left 18 people dead, Maine legislators passed a series of reforms that earned the state “most improved” honors in 2024 from the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence.
Cohn really stretched on behalf of Democrats in the Virginia section. Republicans have succeeded in reducing crime, but he wants to spread credit to the Democrats who came in and promptly imposed some gun control:
With just 218 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2024, Virginia had one of the lowest violent crime rates in the nation, according to FBI statistics. Ceasefire Virginia, launched in 2022 under Gov. Glenn Youngkin and Attorney General Jason Miyares, both Republicans — and continuing under their Democratic successors, Abigail Spanberger and Jay Jones — targets gun violence in 13 municipalities in the Commonwealth with increased penalties for possession and use of firearms by convicted felons. An analysis of the program last year by Virginia Commonwealth University’s Center for Public Policy credited it with a 10% decrease in homicides statewide through 2024, including a 24% reduction in homicides in Ceasefire localities.
It should be noted that Maine has always had a ridiculously low homicide rate, even before gun control was passed post-Lewiston. In fact, Lewiston practically doubled the total number of homicides the state sees on average. As such, gun control has nothing at all to do with how safe the state is.
But when you judge “quality of life” as including a lack of respect for gun rights, it’s not difficult to see why that would be attractive to you.
The issue, though, is that states ranked low aren’t ranked that way because they’re bad places to live. It’s not because they don’t value “reproductive rights” or, as we can see, gun control.
In fact, if you look at the “strengths” and “weaknesses” of various states, you’ll find they universally line up perfectly with the left’s preferred narratives on every single topic I can think of. While I get that some people really do favor things like access to abortion, a lot of people see it as a terrible thing and want nothing to do with it. Is their quality of life degraded because the state favors the lives of the unborn? Probably not, and a very strong case could be made that quality of life is much better for those who are actually born so they can enjoy it.
On guns, though, the attempted link here is to connect gun control with reductions in crime. The problem is that VCU has a very leftist campus, which also impacts other parts of the university. Academia is already anti-gun, but if you take a hard-left faculty and empower them to make determinations on the efficacy of gun control policies while violent crime drops across the nation, they’re going to say gun control played a role. They’re making it up, though, because they have no clue other than their feelings, and we all know it.
And honestly, having to live with the fear that I can’t meet a deadly threat to my family because of the state’s gun laws is going to adversely impact my quality of life.
Anyone who thinks this is the metric of a good life, to be surrounded by leftist policies such as gun control, is someone I’d rather not live in the same neighborhood as.
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