Study Finds States With High Gun Ownership Have Lower Gun Violence

There are calls ringing out across the nation demanding gun control laws in a bid to curb violent crimes and mass shootings. You might imagine that the more guns there are the more shootings there are.

Not so says data, that shows the states with higher percentages of households with guns have fewer shootings. States with stricter gun laws have more.

'Gun ownership is higher in states with fewer restrictions, and homicide rates in these states are lower. People can protect themselves,' George Mason University Professor Emerita Joyce Lee Malcolm told Fox News Digital of what she's found through her research. Malcolm pointed to a study on burglars from 1986 that found 34% of burglars interviewed reported 'to having been scared off, shot at, wounded or captured by an armed victim.' (FoxNews).

FBI data Data compiled shows that murders committed with a gun as the primary tool are not higher, but lower in states known to have a large number of gun owners, and more homes having guns.

Montana and Wyoming are in the top spots for the highest percentages of gun ownership, with more than 66% of households with at least one firearm. Many homes have many guns, not just one. But per capita, those states had a lower murder by gun rate.

Let's look at the raw numbers in just a few places.

In 2019, Montana had 1.5 gun murders per 100,000 population and 2.5 murders per 100,000 population.

Massachusetts and New Jersey for lowest gun ownership in the country at 14.7% of households with at least one gun but their murder by gun rate matched Montana, at 1.25 gun murders per 100,000 people and 2.12 murders per the same population.

In California, only 28% of households have at least one gun. But they had four people murdered per 100,000 population and nearly three gun murders per 100,000 population.

in Maryland 30% of households owned at least one firearm, they had more than seven people per 100,000 were victims of gun murders.

John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, examined the data compiled by Fox News Digital. He noted that there are places around the world that "have banned either all guns or all handguns, yet every single time that those bans have been enacted, murder/homicide rates have gone up."

The explanation is simple: while you might take some guns away from criminals, if you primarily have law-abiding people obeying the ban, you mainly disarm law-abiding people and make it easier for criminals to commit crime