Constitutional Law

Ev Nappen on VPC state rankings

Ev Nappen has a column in the Union Leader on the subject.

"The VPC dares not look at the bottom seven states instead of the arbitrary five. That is because, lo and behold, New Hampshire ranks seventh from the bottom in per capita gun deaths. New Hampshire is undeniably a strong pro-gun state that greatly respects the individual right to keep and bear arms.

New Hampshire is beaten only by sixth-place Connecticut, the home of "Gun Valley," a major area of gun making in the United States. For that matter, all of New England is in the bottom 12....

he VPC also has to purposely limit its selectively picked data to states rather than cities. This is because the one jurisdiction with the strictest gun control in the entire nation is the District of Columbia. In D.C., all handguns are banned, long arms must be stored disassembled, locked and unloaded, and law-abiding citizens have no right to carry guns. According to the same 2005 CDC data relied upon by the VPC, D.C. has the highest rate of shooting deaths of any place in the United States! The district has well over double the national average."

UPDATE: Reader Denton Bramwell has this pdf examining the similar Brady Campaign rankings. Essentially, if you chart States' Brady rankings and their homicide rates, you find no relationship at all. States with As and States with Fs are equally as likely to have a high or low homicide rate, suggesting that Brady's agenda doesn't do anything to reduce violence.

Hat tip to reader Jack Anderson...

Full post as published by Of Arms and the Law on May 05, 2008 (boomark / email).