You find usefully accurate reporting in the strangest of places

Three examples first thing in the morning about the twisted nature of our mainstream media reporting and the whole sector, traditional and non-traditional.  

First up was CDC Data Shows Constitutional Carry States Have Fewer Total and Gun-Related Homicides by Konstadinos Moros.  A right leaning article from a website with a distinctly pro-Second Amendment perspective.  Moros is tackling the usually explicit but sometimes implicit argument often made by those eager to restrict citizens' constitutional right to bear arms.  

The news of constitutional carry in the Lone Star State was met with the all of the usual sky-is-falling warnings of doom from all of the usual anti-gun suspects.

For example, Ari Frielich, state policy director for the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said that permitless carry could drastically endanger Texas residents and even law enforcement officials.

The research is clear that flooding public spaces with more hidden loaded guns in more hands makes them less safe. It turns more arguments, road rage incidents, and fistfights into shootings, more injuries into burials, and it can create a civilian arms race in communities most impacted by violence.

Freilich’s talking points are hardly original. Every time a state adopts constitutional carry, anti-gun groups, as well as much of the media (but I repeat myself), warn that every minor dispute will turn into a bloody shootout and the state’s homicide rate will therefore skyrocket. They also claim that the “research is clear” in favor of their arguments.

But is it really?

Fair enough.  I read and hear that argument made pretty explicitly all the time by those advocating gun control.  And there is obviously a logic to the argument.  It is intuitively obvious that human are frequently emotional and often less than rational.  Introducing weaponry into such an environment would obviously increase the number of gun deaths, wouldn't it?

But in dynamic, loosely coupled, evolving complex systems, logic is often not the reliable guide we would wish it to be.  We should ways pair logic with evidence.  Because there is an also attractive counter-argument, one made long ago by Robert Heinlein in Beyond This Horizon.

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.

Both logical arguments.  What does the evidence actually say?

Moros tackles the evidence by comparing the gun murder rate in states which have permitless constitutional carry regimes to those states where guns are still controlled to a greater or lesser degree.  In those constitutional carry states, all adults, with some exceptions usually based on criminal history, are free to own guns and carry them either concealed or open.  

Moros identifies 16 constitutional carry states with 2020 CDC detailed data.  He compares the states:

With that in mind, the results are as follows: the average overall homicide rate among the sixteen constitutional carry states in 2020 was 6.9 per 100,000, beating the national average of 7.5 per 100,000. Perhaps more surprisingly, constitutional carry states also saw a lower gun-related homicide rate: 5.3 per 100,000, compared to the national figure of 5.9 per 100,000.

Moros is circumspect as to exactly how far the evidence can go.

Whether or not a difference of 0.6 per 100,000 in each measure speaks to any kind of statistical significance is debatable. Moreover, there are certainly criticisms one could level at this analysis. Perhaps several of these states have independent reasons for why their homicide rates aren’t very high overall despite constitutional carry, or maybe one could argue the negative, that these states would have even lower homicide rates if it weren’t for such laws.

Regardless, the data does not support the anti-gunners’ argument that constitutional carry states are especially violent and that violence is caused by permitless carry. Even when it comes to gun-related homicide, constitutional carry states are at least as safe as the nation as a whole, and perhaps slightly safer.

He is right to be careful.  Read the article for the details about the sixteen states but there are a number of obvious patterns.  The most obvious differences are:

The states are whiter on average than the nation as a whole.

They are less densely populated.

They have a lower urbanization rate.

They are not only more rural, they are more agricultural.

Those are just the obvious differences.  Since gun deaths vary hugely between cultural/racial groups, that variable alone should raise concerns about simple comparisons.  For example, the Age-Adjusted Assault (Homicide) Death Rates for African-Americans in 2019 was 21.3 compared to a rate of 3.3 per 100,000 among whites.  Similar disparities are clear among the constitutional carry states with New Hampshire having a murder rate of 1.0 while Mississippi has a rate of 19.4 per 100,000.

Moros's evidence is effective at dismissing the bromide that more guns are associated with more gun violence.  But a very quick check reinforces that this is not a simple question, as Moros acknowledges.  If you go to the CDC data, here, you can do some quick and dirty checks.  

I identified, very informally, fourteen states which, from peripheral knowledge, have the reputation of being gun unfriendly.  That is the limit of precision.  But I think it is probably usefully accurate.  The fourteen are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Rhode Island.  These fourteen states have a 2020 murder rate of 6.1 per 100,000.  The 2020 rate for those with laws more Second Amendment friendly have a murder rate of 7.8 per 100,000.  The actual state differences ranged from 1.6/100.000 (Maine) to 20.5/100,000 (Mississippi).

With these variances, it is clear that there are other variables far more predictive of gun violence than simple legal status or ease of gun ownership.

Moros is effective in demolishing that particular argument.  The argument that is most prominent in mainstream media reporting.  

What struck me was that I was getting both a more data infused reporting from a news site that is advocacy oriented than from the mainstream media sources and that the reporting was more explicit about the limits of the argument.  

There might be good reasons to oppose constitutional carry.  But the role of constitutional carry as a driver of violence is not one of those good arguments.  

And it is striking to have that clearly laid out in an advocacy news report and obscured by the mainstream media.