The most armed states have the most firearm murders. Most people in the United States would think this statement to be true. A few articles I read recently seem to say other wise. As you can see in the chart to the left DC, Louisiana and Alabama lead the nation in murders by firearms. If the logic of our earlier statement was true, you would expect those same states to have the highest level of gun ownership. Washington D.C. actually ranks last with only 155 gun ownership background checks per 100k people. Louisiana is about half way up the list at #21 with 13,329 background checks per 100k residents.  The state with the highest background checks per 100k residents is Kentucky. Where does Kentucky sit in the average murders by firearm list though? Kentucky is actually below the nation average! Kentucky though is a bit of an outlier because it handles background checks differently then most others. So what is the next state on the list of background checks? Utah. Where does Utah sit in the chart of firearm deaths? 10th from the bottom, again, below the nation average. Ok, 3rd time is the charm right? How about #3 on the list, Montana? Ranks 3rd for background checks, but again it is below the nation average. So the three states which have the most people applying for gun ownership actually have firearm murder rates below the nation average. 

How does all this make sense with what we are told? Doesn’t more guns equal more gun violence? To keep this totally honest the background check numbers are a little speculative because not all states do it the same way. However, the correlation between the two charts is all over the place.  This information also does not take into account illegal gun ownership (people that don’t go through background checks). Isn’t this really the point though? If we want gun regulation to help control if not stop firearm deaths, don’t we want to see a high level of correlation between those two things?