Red states like Iowa keep relaxing gun control. Homicides are falling anyway.
Instead of chastising Iowa for its “dangerous” gun laws, groups like Everytown and Giffords might ask: why are Iowans so much less violent than other Americans?
“As Gun Laws Weaken, Gun Deaths Rise” (Except when they don’t)
Iowa repealed its background check and concealed carry permit laws in 2021. Since 2024, school teachers and staff can carry on campus. Despite "dangerous" laws, Iowa's gun violence is low and falling. At the same time, gun control groups claim that, "As gun laws weaken, gun deaths rise."
They support this claim with cross-sectional comparisons revealing higher firearm-involved death rates in states with fewer restrictions on firearm purchasing, storage, and carrying compared to states with stricter gun laws. When firearm suicides are omitted from the analysis, the relationship between firearm regulations and firearm deaths is weaker. Relatedly, RAND publishes an annual synthesis of peer-reviewed firearm policy research which examines the latest research on 18 firearm regulations to find, for instance, “supportive” evidence that stand-your-ground laws increase firearm homicides, but “inconclusive” evidence that permitless concealed carrying laws do the same.
Firearm homicides are extremely high in some places with the most lax gun control laws (i.e. many cities in southern and “rust belt” states). But state-level snapshots either don’t account for changes in firearm homicides over time or neglect to consider city-level trends that complicate narratives about “red versus blue state” firearm violence.
As I have previously shown, all populous states in the US contained numerous cities meeting the adverse benchmark Firearm Homicide Rate of ≥10.2 per 100,000 (in 2021). By contrast, most of the least populous, rural states with permissive gun laws and high rates of gun ownership contain few or no cities that met this adverse benchmark. Then, Firearm Homicide Rates (FHRs) increased in 42/50 states from 2015-2021, including in states that tightened and loosened gun control laws after deadly mass shootings. Finally, gun violence fell in the overwhelming majority of US cities in both 2023 and 2024, regardless of whether they resided in states that loosened or strengthened their firearm regulations in the preceding years.
This, plus the “Idaho paradox” needs to be noted in our conversations about the relationship between firearm violence and state-level gun laws because—omitting suicide—many rural, gun-loving states enjoy low rates of intentional firearm violence.
Should Iowans be concerned about a future spike in violence?
Claims like the following made by gun control group Everytown need to be evaluated (my emphasis in bold):
Iowa repealed both its background check and carry permit laws in 2021, losing over 40% of its gun law score in one year, and in 2024 passed a dangerous law allowing teachers to carry guns into K-12 schools. This new, radical change in its score provides a partial and likely temporary explanation for its relatively low gun death rate. Iowans should be concerned about a future spike in violence.
Importantly, the incident that compelled Iowa’s state assembly to enact the “radical” change to its gun laws described above involved a 17-year old active shooter at an Iowa high school who killed two and injured seven others before turning the weapon on himself. The teenage shooter obtained the weapons he used from family members who did not store them securely.
[T]he shooter brought two guns into the school that day, a pump-action shotgun and a revolver, along with a knife and an improvised explosive device.
According to investigators, the revolver was never used but belonged to the gunman's father. Bayens said the weapon was not secured with a lock or inside a gun safe. Evidence also supports that the gunman knew how to access the gun.
The shotgun is believed to be from a large gun collection belonging to extended family and was taken without the owner's permission or knowledge. Investigators were unable to track down the weapon's current owner, as the last traceable sale happened about a decade prior and is believed to have been privately sold since.
So, let’s see what happened in Iowa since they eased their gun laws in 2021. Below are statewide annual firearm homicides and injuries since 2019. The state of Iowa has experienced fewer firearm assaults and homicides every year since relaxing some of its gun laws in 2021.
Next, I report murder rates for each of Iowa’s cities with over 50,000 residents, before and after 2021. Notably, while most US cities experienced their highest gun murder rates in 2021 or 2022, Iowa’s cities peaked in various years, with Waterloo, Davenport, and Cedar Rapids peaking in 2020 and Des Moines and Ames in 2022. In 2024, all but one (Des Moines) of these 11 cities reported fewer gun murders than in 2021, reflecting a consistent downward trend in firearm violence in the state since its cities reached their various homicide peaks.
Will the “dangerous law” signed this year by Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds permitting teachers to carry guns caused gun murders to spike in 2025?
This is a dubious claim for a few reasons. First, Giffords Law Center maintains a database of Every Incident of Mishandled Guns in Schools (which clearly hasn’t been updated in years). This not comprehensive list includes 39 incidents of “guns left accessible to children,” 20 incidents of guns discharged unintentionally, 6 incidents of guns being mishandled “during discipline,” 20 incidents of guns being used in the midst of a personal (mental health) crisis or interpersonal conflict, and 22 incidents of gun brought onto campus.
Having read through the descriptions of each incident, what’s striking is that none of these describe situations in which a certified school teacher or staff member intentionally or accidentally shot anyone. Instead, the list is populated with examples of unhinged and/or thoughtless school employees and parents bringing guns to campus in defiance of the law and either accidentally shooting someone or themself, or threatening violence against others. There are also several (alarming) examples of clumsy school resource officers accidentally shooting themselves or a student. Notably, zero of these incidents occurred in Iowa since the list omits the Perry High School shooting that inspired the Iowa legislature to pass its new law to harden schools and arm teachers.
Will gun violence surge in Iowa as a result of encouraging teachers and staff to arm themselves by providing them with training, resources, and qualified immunity? I think not. First, the Iowa law is primarily focused on funding school safety and surveillance technology (i.e., gun detectors and cameras) and hiring more school resource officers (schools with more than 9000 students are now required to have them). It doesn’t force teachers to arm themselves, and the people who do so aren’t likely to be any more mentally unstable or clumsy than the type of school employees who bring guns to school when they aren’t permitted to do so.
Will it make schools safer? They’re already incredibly safe to begin with, so let’s be honest about how often a school shooting is likely to occur in the first place. Do school resource officers serve an important role in stopping active shooters? Absolutely. Can armed teachers and staff with requisite, but likely minimal firearms training assist in these rare and horrible situations to save lives? Perhaps.
Is school violence, or gun violence generally, a problem in Iowa?
Either way, we’re asking the wrong questions by focusing on rare atypical incidents of firearm violence in states like Iowa where the murder rate was 1.8 per 100,000 in 2024, and is on pace to be even lower in 2025. This is a homicide rate lower than the European Union average!
Iowa’s limited amount of firearm violence isn’t going to be increased (or lessened) by arming a few additional school employees, although the rare school shooting might be thwarted by some combination of more school security, resource officers, and armed personnel. Most of Iowa’s minuscule amount of firearm violence is concentrated in small cities like Waterloo and Des Moines, which account for three and five, respectively, of the state’s 25 homicides involving a firearm in 2025 reported as of July 16th. Law enforcement attribute gun violence in these cities to teenagers obtaining firearms through theft (lock up your guns and cars, people!) and resolving interpersonal conflicts with violence.
Moreover, Des Moines had a firearm homicide rate of 7.5 per 100,000 in 2024. Among 134 cities with populations greater than 200,000, Des Moines’ rank was 63rd. (See searchable table below).
It bears repeating that Iowa doesn’t have a widespread and/or (currently) worsening gun violence problem. All firearm deaths are tragedies, but Iowa is one of the safest states in the country. The state legislature’s symbolic efforts to show that they are “doing something” in response to a horrific school shooting, or to shore up support from the 2A crowd by moving to permitless concealed carry are unlikely to change this. Instead of chastising Iowa for its “dangerous” gun laws, groups like Everytown and Giffords might ask: why are Iowans so much less violent than other Americans?