If Alaska was a city...
It would have fewer firearm homicides than all similarly-sized US cities except for Boston, San Francisco, El Paso, and Seattle. If Wyoming was a city, it would be the safest place in America.
Why, then, do so many people believe that “red” states like Alaska and Wyoming have some of the highest rates of gun violence in the entire country? Because of articles like this published in Forbes by Ariana Johnson last year.
Johnson’s article describes peer-reviewed research published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Surgery that found, “firearm deaths are more likely in small rural towns than in major urban cities.” Johnson argues that this research “contradicts [the] common belief that Democratic blue areas have higher incidences of gun-related deaths than do Republican red districts.”
Except the research study wasn’t focused exclusively on incidents of firearm violence in rural versus urban areas. The authors were studying all firearm fatalities. Suicides comprise between 54-60% of annual firearm fatalities. The rest are homicides, with a negligible amount of firearm fatalities (<1%) attributable to accidents. According to the original study:
“Between 2011 and 2020…The most rural counties had a 76% (95% CI, 58%-95%) higher gun suicide death rate and a 46% (95% CI, 28%-76%) lower gun homicide death rate compared to the most urban counties.” (my emphasis)
Nonetheless, Johnson cites CDC firearm mortality data to show her readers how much worse gun violence is in Trump-voting states than in “blue” America. Wyoming and Alaska are ranked 5th and 6th, respectively.
But this is driven by Wyoming and Alaska’s disproportionately high suicide rates, not homicides. Importantly, suicides aren’t evenly distributed across the US population (white males accounted for 68% of suicide deaths in 2022), or the US states.
This handy State Firearm Mortality Explorer tool maintained by left-learning policy think tank RAND, shows how each state’s total firearm fatality rate, suicide rate, and homicide rate compares to the national average. Check it out!
When all firearm fatalities are combined, Alaska ranks among the worst, with a firearm mortality rate (in 2021) that was 69% higher than the national average.
Alaska’s population is 64% white and there are roughly 109 men for every 100 women, making Alaska the US state with the highest male to female ratio in 2020. Demographics and household gun ownership correlate with disproportionately high firearm mortality rates driven by suicides in rural states like Alaska.
But these don’t correlate with a higher than average firearm homicide rate in Alaska. This holds for many rural states, including Wyoming, where there are reportedly more guns than people.
An honest conversation about the problem of gun violence in America, i.e., people intentionally harming others with firearms, must distinguish between firearm homicides and suicides. These two distinct types of gun deaths aren’t distributed evenly across states or demographics. Obviously, all firearm deaths are facilitated by easy access to guns, but suicides and homicides have distinctive causes that require distinctive solutions.