What do State-level Trends in Memorial Day Shootings Show Us? (Not much, and this matters)

Gun violence is concentrated in a few cities. States with higher gun ownership rates don't automatically have the most (or any) gun violence over Memorial Day weekend.

These maps are interactive, so click the link to see the number of shootings and rates for each state.

State maps like this (which journalists frequently use when reporting on gun violence trends) are pretty, but they don’t tell us where violence is concentrated. For example, we can safely assume (as I’ve shown here) that Chicago, Pennsylvania, and Houston are driving Memorial Day gun violence in Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Texas. However, California isn’t magenta on the map below because of shootings in LA (1 dead, 2 injured). Rather, several cities like Sacramento (5 dead) and Fresno (3 injured, 4 dead ) drove California’s violence that weekend, including one “mass shooting” (3 injured, 1 dead), in the small city of Merced, population 89,000.

In other words, most communities in a state with seemingly high or even the highest amount of Memorial Day gun violence don’t experience a single shooting. We should at least consider population size to get a better sense of how to interpret amounts of firearm violence in a given state. Below are the rates per 100,000 of firearm violence across the states during Memorial Day Weekend (Friday-Monday).

However, this map reveals another problem with state-level comparisons, even when controlling for population. Consider Wyoming, Colorado, and Oregon, which each had 0.35 shootings per 100,000. This is a relatively low (but not the lowest) rate. But over 80% (12) of Oregon’s 15 Memorial day shootings were concentrated in Portland. The state of Oregon is low violence overall, but the city of Portland is relatively high based on its population size.

This relates to a critique I have of research and reporting that correlates firearm violence rates reported at the state level with other state-level factors, especially gun ownership and gun laws.

For example, look at the map below for the state-level estimates of legal firearm ownership. These don’t closely correlate with the Memorial Day violence rate maps, although there’s enough overlap in the South to suggest a connection. Still, several states with super-majorities of gun owners like Alaska, Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming experienced some of the lowest rates of firearm violence over Memorial day weekend.

Nonetheless, researchers and reporters frequently link firearm ownership with gun violence which, although correlated in the South for all sorts of reasons, is quite confusing to people who live in states where most people own guns, but shootings are rare.

I grew up in a place like this, Delta Junction, Alaska. Delta is a very small town (population: 1000), but even the cities in Alaska like Fairbanks and Anchorage have dramatically lower firearm violence rates compared to comparable cities in states with lower rates of gun ownership. If we want gun owners to support policies and initiatives that reduce gun violence (and considering how many people own guns this is neccessary), we need to acknowledge that their reality is one in which guns are prevalent, but gun violence is rare (especially considering the sheer amount of guns everywhere). Legal gun owners will support enforcing existing gun laws and enacting new gun control measures like red flag laws, universal background checks, safe storage rules, and theft reporting requirements, but not if you come out with guns blazing by locating all the blame for gun violence on them.