Setting Violence Policy Center Straight on ‘Gun Deaths’

With a name like “Violence Policy Center,” one might imagine an organization focused on all forms of violence. One’s imagination would be wrong, though, because the VPC never seems to look at anything except guns.

This, of course, is how most gun control groups try to position themselves these days. They pretend it’s not about control, just heading off violence, which always seems to amount to the exact same things. Weird, isn’t it?

Regardless, the VPC trots out a lot of “reports,” and their latest needs some attention. Why? Because it’s the epitome of an anti-gun mess masquerading and unbaised research.

Just-released data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) show that states with the highest rates of overall gun death in the nation are those with weaker gun violence prevention laws and higher rates of gun ownership according to a new Violence Policy Center (VPC) analysis.

In contrast, the five states with the lowest overall gun death rates have stronger gun violence prevention laws and lower rates of gun ownership.

The VPC analysis uses just-published 2024 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) WONDER data and presents overall gun death rates state by state for 2024, which is the most recent year for which data are available. The deaths include gun homicides, suicides, and unintentional shootings. Tables of the states with the five highest overall gun death rates and the five lowest overall gun death rates are below. For a list of overall gun death rates in all 50 states, see https://www.vpc.org/state-firearm-death-rates-ranked-by-rate-2024/.

The state with the highest gun death rate in 2024 was Mississippi, followed by New Mexico, Alaska, Alabama, and Wyoming. The state with the lowest gun death rate in the nation was Hawaii, followed by Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island.

The total number of Americans killed by gunfire in 2024 was 44,447, a five percent decrease from 46,728 in 2023. The nationwide overall gun death rate decreased from 13.7 per 100,000 in 2023 to 12.8 per 100,000 in 2024.

While the number of firearm homicides decreased by 14 percent from 17,927 in 2023 to 15,364 in 2024, firearm suicides increased by one percent — from 27,300 in 2023 to 27,593 in 2024.

VPC Government Affairs Director Kristen Rand states, “The evidence could not be more compelling that states with more guns and weaker gun laws have far higher rates of gun death. The inescapable conclusion is that reducing exposure to firearms and implementing stronger gun laws saves lives.”

Except that the “inescapable conclusion” only looks inescapable because of how badly this nonsense was constructed.

First, they do note that many of these “gun deaths” were suicides. You can do the math yourself and see that you’re looking at around two-thirds, which is about normal.

What you don’t see, though, is what the variance in the overall suicide rate is. How many people claimed their lives with something other than a firearm, and how did that compare to the previous year?

See, the reason you see “gun suicides” as high in states with high gun ownership is because of common sense. If someone wants to end their life, and they have the means to do so on hand, then that’s what they’re likely to use. If they don’t have a gun and can’t get one easily enough, they seek out another means. While anti-gunners argue that a gun is the most effective means, there are others that are damn near as effective.

Suicides aren’t a gun issue; they’re a mental health problem. I know anti-gunners don’t like to hear that, but it doesn’t change the facts in the least.

When you divorce “gun suicides” from other suicides, the only reason to do so would be to attack guns, rather than prevent suicide.

This attack somehow supposes that guns are the issue, not what someone does with them, which is par for the course with anti-gunners. Never mind that over the last few years, we’ve had economic uncertainty and nothing but black-pill rhetoric about the end of the Republic, the need to murder anyone who disagrees with certain groups, and that everyone is evil. It’s enough to wear on anyone, so a slight uptick in suicides might well have to do with the doomscrolling that seems inescapable these days, rather than anything else.

But why look for why people might want to take their own life when you can try to leverage it to infringe on the right of the people to keep and bear arms?

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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