In here, you can see the breakdown of gun deaths per state. You'll note that all the states with the loosest firearm regulation (primarily the south and southwestern states, excepting California) all have much higher numbers of annual death by gun.
How about we look at this data, reinterpreted?
Top ten highest gun deaths, by state, and top ten lowest gun deaths, by state. You'll note that the places where firearms are the most heavily regulated (northeastern states) have the least gun-related deaths, while the places where firearm control is the loosest (south) have the most gun deaths by state.
Here's another real life application!
Australia's conservative government, after the 1996 Port Arthur Massacre, banned ALL automatic and semi-automatic weapons, mandated new licensure laws involving strict background checks and waiting periods, and instituted a gun buyback program which removed nearly 700,000 guns from circulation. What was the result?
As you can see, in the two years following, total gun deaths, gun suicides, and gun homicides all went straight down.
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For those of you who have actually looked at the statistics, you'll note that some places with really strict gun control have high gun-related deaths and gun-related homicide rates anyway! This is only to be expected; we're not looking at each state or city or whatnot individually, we're looking at the big picture! If your state has very loose gun control laws and high gun ownership rates, which describes most southern states, you're MORE LIKELY to be on the annual top ten gun deaths and top ten gun homicides list. You're not guaranteed to be off those lists if you have strict gun control laws - it just so happens that far more southern states (with loose gun control laws) are on those lists than northeastern ones (with strict gun control laws)!
So yes, indeed you can point to places like Washington D.C. as having very strict gun control laws, and still having high gun-related homicide rates! Furthermore, you could point to places like Indiana, which have fairly low gun-related homicide rates despite having almost no gun regulation at all. But you'll note that the vast majority of the nation's highest homicide rates are still in fact in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc, which are notorious for their complete lack of gun control. And you'll note that the vast majority of the states with low gun-related homicide rates are in the Northeast, and have very strict gun control laws.
tl;dr do your research before you make claims that people can examine in detail.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 05/20/2014 08:23AM by vortexmagus.