Gun Laws Matter 2012:
Understanding the Link Between Weak Laws and Gun Violence
Posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2012
We hear stories of gun violence every day. Domestic disputes turning deadly. Street crimes taking the lives of innocent people. Mass shootings wreaking havoc in our public spaces. Suicides and fatal accidents devastating families across the country. The unrelenting toll of America’s gun violence epidemic leaves 100,000 people injured or killed every year in communities nationwide.1 But while the number of people affected by this crisis is staggering – 86 people die by guns every single day – it’s almost equally shocking to find that legislators nationwide aren’t doing everything in their power to prevent the killings.
Plenty of widely supported policies can reduce gun violence, but, in many states, they aren’t being adopted.2 In fact, a number of states have chosen to pass measures that actually make it more difficult for law enforcement, doctors, and local officials to work to reduce gun deaths and injuries.
Click on each state’s initials in the map below to see our analysis of the gun laws in that state.
Grades have been assigned based on the strength of each state’s gun laws. A state in blue (or orange) has one of the ten lowest (or highest) gun death rates of all fifty states.
See a larger, non-clickable version of this map.
State gun laws are critical because our federal gun laws are extremely weak and leave enormous gaps. For example, 40% of all gun sales can be completed without background checks because federal law doesn’t require checks for firearm sales between private parties.3 Unless states step in and adopt their own smart laws, federal gaps like these allow guns to easily flow into the hands of criminals.
- Nat’l Ctr. for Injury Prevention & Control, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Web-Based Injury Statistics Query & Reporting System (WISQARS) Injury Mortality Reports, 1999-2010, for National, Regional, and States; Nat’l Ctr. for Injury Prevention & Control, U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Web-Based Injury Statistics Query & Reporting System (WISQARS) Nonfatal Injury Reports. [↩]
- For model legislation on a number of critical gun violence prevention polices, see our publication Model Laws for a Safer America. [↩]
- Philip J. Cook & Jens Ludwig, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms, U.S. Department of Justice, National Institute of Justice Research in Brief 6-7 (May 1997). See our Federal Law on Private Sales page for more information. [↩]
