U.S.A. — Washington, D.C.—a jurisdiction with some of the strictest gun control laws in the country—leads the nation with “the highest rate of mass shootings per capita,” according to a report in the Daily Mail, citing new research released this week by medical researchers in Colorado.
Here’s how the Daily Mail headlined its story: “America’s mass shooting hotspots revealed: First of its kind study breaks down thousands of massacres by state – and there’s NO correlation between gun control laws.”
The study is published in JAMA Network Open, and it relies on data from the Gun Violence Archive, a database often criticized by the firearms community. The work was done by researchers at the University of Colorado: Leslie M. Barnard, MPH, Department of Epidemiology, Colorado School of Public Health; Erin Wright-Kelly, DrPH, MA, Injury and Violence Prevention Center, Colorado School of Public Health, and Marian E. Betz, MD, MPH, Department of Emergency Medicine, University of Colorado School of Medicine, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus, Aurora.
The report may cool some jets in the gun control community, which has maintained that states with the most guns and “lax” laws have the highest number of shootings. But here’s what the report says:
“The rate of mass shootings per 1,000,000 people was highest in the District of Columbia (10.4 shootings), followed by much lower rates in Louisiana (4.2 mass shootings) and Illinois (3.6 mass shootings), the states with the next 2 highest rates (Table).”
Translation: Gun laws do not appear to have an impact, since the District of Columbia and the state of Illinois have restrictive laws, while Louisiana is far less restrictive.
As detailed by the Daily Mail, the “Top Ten” jurisdictions for mass shootings are:
- Washington, D.C. (10.43 per million)
- Louisiana (4.28 per million)
- Illinois (3.61 per million)
- Mississippi (2.91 per million)
- Alabama (2.32 per million)
- Missouri (2.29 per million)
- South Carolina (2.26 per million)
- Delaware (2.18 per million)
- Tennessee (2.03 per million)
- Maryland (2.2 per million)
Another interesting revelation in the report explains, “From 2014 to 2022, there were 4011 mass shootings, ranging from zero events in Hawaii and North Dakota to 414 events in Illinois. For these 9 years, one-third (27.3%) were social-related mass shootings, 15.8% were crime related, 11.1% were domestic violence (DV) related, 1.4% were school or work related, and 52.0% were not a part of these categories (Table). There was a median of 45 mass shootings per state for all states and the District of Columbia (mean, 78.6). A total of 21 006 people were killed or injured (Table).”
More data which may be problematic for proponents of stricter gun control laws, shows Illinois had the most mass shootings (414), California came in second with 367 while Texas reportedly had 270 such incidents. Gun law differences between the three states are dramatic.
The state with the highest rate of gun ownership, according to World Population Review, is Montana, where 66.3 percent of adults own a gun, and it had one of the lowest numbers of mass shootings at 4. Neighboring Wyoming, which is second highest for gun ownership at 66.2 percent of adults owning guns had only one (1) mass shooting.
Meanwhile, New York, with 19.9 percent gun ownership, had 186 mass shootings, and neighboring New Jersey, with 14.7 percent gun ownership, had 93 mass shootings, according to a state-by-state chart published with the study.
And to demonstrate further how gun laws do not correlate with mass shootings, Hawaii, with 14.9 percent gun ownership and North Dakota, with 55.1 percent gun ownership, had no (0) mass shootings, the only two states on the chart with zero incidents during the study period.
The Daily Mail report quotes Ph.D. student Barnard, who stated, “We wanted to help explain the ‘why, where and how often’ to give people an understanding of this issue.
“This study is not intended to answer every question, but highlights components to generate more hypotheses,” she added.
Barnard acknowledged that the definition of a “mass shooting” varies, “depending on the source.”
“While we consider mass shootings as four or more persons shot or killed,” Barnard said, “some data sources only count deaths.”
She acknowledged that this discrepancy could make research difficult for epidemiologists.
The report could make things just as difficult for the gun prohibition lobby, which has argued frequently that states with so-called “lax” gun laws are more deadly than states with more restrictive laws. This new research tends to refute that claim.
About Dave Workman
Dave Workman is a senior editor at TheGunMag.com and Liberty Park Press, author of multiple books on the Right to Keep & Bear Arms, and formerly an NRA-certified firearms instructor.
The unvarnished Truth is that Gun Laws have not prevented a single crime. Simply because Laws don’t prevent Crime. They only serve to penalize those that break the law.
Chronic ever expanding gun control is also used effectively to suppress citizen interest in firearms altogether. The public spectacle itself is so profound millions dismiss firearms as simply “too much trouble”.
Don’t know why you would get a downvote on that.
They are trying the same kind of tactic with President Trump.
I can give you only one up vote. Here is my second !!!!!!!
Me too.
You are so correct, Chuck. Laws do not stop criminality, they let society know what the degree of punishment will be if you break that specific law. Criminals do not give a sh*t about laws. They are going to do what they are going to do. Regardless of what the gun control freaks say or do. The same goes for guns. Guns do not kill others, criminals kill other people. Criminals just use a gun, or a piece of wood, or a pipe, or a rock, or whatever……… We do not have a gun problem in America, we have a… Read more »
Your last paragraph nailed it and said it all in a clear and concise method. Too bad it is proven to be beyond democrat comprehension.
Vote republican, vote Trump. He started to clean it up once when he didn’t know what he was doing. They are afraid because they know he knows how to finish the job now. This four year break was perfect to regroup and prepare.
Excellent report, Dave!
They never mention illegal or unlawfully obtained firearms in their equation. The fact of thuggery or criminality is left out for a reason, those are the more probable perps, Law abiding gun owners are rarely found in their statistics. The number of firearms in a particular state is not a yardstick accurate enough to make predictions of mass murderers. They’re just nutcases.
PN – excellent point – when some ‘nutcase’ (too many of them true enough) commits a crime there are something like 110 MILLION legally armed folks who did NOT a single crime of any sort.
PM, there is no such thing as an illegal firearms. Illegally possessed under current law perhaps, but not in and of itself illegal.
Reference John Lott’s work on this, and you’ll see violence tracks to urban centers where Leftists are in control and freedom has been most restricted. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4325838 Carl Moody has published a study on the policies that do reduce mass public shooting events: https://crimeresearch.org/2023/07/is-there-a-policy-that-reduces-mass-public-shooting-deaths/ The JAMA study, which continues to focus on state level data, accidently confirms this by including Washington, DC and claiming it’s an outlier. In fact, like the violent urban counties identified in the Lott study, there is a definite correlation between anti-freedom laws, lax prosecution of violent criminals and “woke progressive” approaches to governance. The Leftist controlled… Read more »
just commented on prof lott’s research in a previous comment. a vast majority of crime is conducted in a very small number of zip codes by a very small amount of individuals.
only common theme here is criminal behavior. criminals will use any item at hand, whether it be a firearm, knife, hands and feet, vehicle. i remember here in so fla in the 80’s people were using machetes.
Give these statistics time to adjust to the more REAL future we are about to face. The 40-50 million illegals that have entered our country haven’t settled in yet.
MM, let’s just say he’ been ‘accused’ of that grisly crime, since he has yet to be convicted of anything. We should always come down on the side of “not guilty until proven in a court of law.”
Your point about blaming the gun (nobody ever talks about “knife violence” for example) is spot-on.
And, no, I did not feel “dissed” at all. I knew where you were going.
As always, thanks for reading and sharing this AMMOLAND report.
Dave a good article as usual. Do you happen to have a breakdown of deaths and injuries out of that 21K over that eight year period? Might be really interesting to compare that to all other criminal deaths and/or injuries for the same period. Or for traffic ‘accidents’ as well.
Good reporting. One question; Where does Chicago fit in with all of the SLAUGHTER occurring daily???
Chicago is most of the illinois stats, there might be some from East St.Louis.
Chicago YTD
Shot & Killed: 385
Shot & Wounded: 1634
Total Shot: 2019
To anti-gunners reports of disparities in gun violence between venues do not matter. Their retort will always be that there’s a need for heavy restrictions nationwide for gun controls to be effective. This is a key element of their rhetoric. Ours must be that there must be strict (and hopefully, uniform) punishment for persons committing crimes with guns.
PS – and 84 were slaughtered using a semi truck in France a few years ago. The point raised by another commenter is appropriate – the gun banners ONLY ‘count’ deaths/injuries from criminal use of guns, all those ‘other’ deaths/injuries are unimportant.
As for Mass Shootings, in just about every case (at least in the last 10 to 20 years), there’s quite a bit of evidence that looks suspiciously like grooming was going on. Uvalde, confirmed it’s going on in my mind.
Social Media, just makes the whole process easier to do, and to hide it, to an extent.
Sorry, but I strongly suspect the F**kers ruining our country, wouldn’t hesitate to commit False Flags. They want us disarmed, and they won’t hesitate to committ Mass Murder to reach their goal.
Chuck add in the use of psychotropic drugs into the ‘grooming’ mix and you definitely have a recipe for disaster. And there is little doubt there are warped individuals who are more than willing to perpetrate crimes to further the ‘agenda(s)’.
BTW, I have asked for folks to come up with another term for ‘false flag’ events as that term has a connotation attached to it that the action didn’t ‘really’ happen. So far, no results.
“frameup“, “stitch up”, or “setup”
Hmmm, listing by state is one way to mask whether or not the shootings are in Democrat cities with their own extra gun laws. I would also note the No Guns areas are federal pushed upon the republican states.
The most valuable statistic would be the number of mass shootings committed by those with prior criminal records, as opposed to by those with no prior criminal record. I suspect that the correlation with prior record would be off the charts – of course, that assumes that the perpetrators are caught and documented, but at least some would be, and that would be documented in the study and factored into the statistical analysis. I would guess that – regardless of the gun law severity in any given state, the most highly-correlated factor would be prior criminality. If so, the policy… Read more »
Oh! well looks like the Gun Violence Archive needs to work on their data, this is totally unacceptable and does not line up with the agenda!!
Most excellent work Mr. Workman. As of course our federal government with the aid and assistance of Republicans move forward with a massive gun control agenda.
it’s the people not the gun; just like a shovel cannot dig a hole without help from a person a gun cannot shoot anyone wit out the help of a person
The UK should take note. Reference the 2021 Plymouth Shooting.
Allot of this information is almost an exact match of what I read and posted from the ominous Wikipedia that was pulled down by Ammoland and argued by people, not Ammoland that since I used them, I am the socialist left. Notice, the article data comes from the doctors etc. from Gun Violence Archive a data source not respected or accepted normally by the gun community. Since it reports something positive and in favor of what gun owners want, I wonder if everyone would be willing to accept it and use it to their advantage or if they would refuse… Read more »
LOL, posted less than 2 minutes and already a downvote. Go for it!!!!!!
MM, very well said and anywhere the leftists are congregating, there is going to be an upsurge in violence, period. Case in point: King County, (basically Seattle) WA. has almost and soon will be doubling their shooting deaths and gun violence this year since 2021. Every day on the local news , they announce at least one and sometimes more use of guns used in such things as robberies, drive by shootings, and other uses of firearms where there appears to be no reason for it at all. This weekend is the start of the annual Seafair celebration in Seattle.… Read more »
Nice article.
We have said this forever.
More legal gun owners (preferably with some training) not mandatory though will provide much lower crime rates.
That’s the fact Jack.
Every able bodied person should carry a fire arm and know how to use it properly.
Crime in our states that honor the 2nd will take care of crime.
Next, hopefully we playing carnival shooting galley with those coming across the border illegally.
I wish for this every day.
An absolute death penalty would stop the mass shootings. But even Texas and Florida wimped out on that.
You were exactly right. Until now. The El Paso mass shooter [who was worse than even Charles Whitman] was spared the death penalty. And so was the Parkland shooter in Florida. That’s because if the most heinous killers are spared, plenty of wrath and vengeance remains for “precautionary” action against the 2A and millions of American bystanders who shot nobody.
I will give you a thumbs up this time since you made good points, were rational and seemed to make it through a post without invoking disinformation about voter fraud, overtly racist statements, and disproven QANON conspiracies.
Nope! Without the alphabet soup, who do you think is going to do the work again crime and graff, some dumba_s bubba with a beer belly and a gun?