This graph from Mother Jones has been making the rounds on social media lately.

Their data is from 2013. It compares “gun ownership” as a percentage of the population vs “gun deaths” per capita. The anti-gun people are making the tired old argument that “More Guns = More Deaths.”

The first problem with this data is that it conflates suicide deaths with gun deaths. This is a problem because suicides account for the majority of gun deaths. If you delve further into the data, you’ll also find that states with stricter gun control also have lower suicide rates. Is that causation? Here’s a graph from 2014 by the CDC:

Sure enough, CA, IL, and NY are all tight gun control states with lower suicide rates. MT, WY, and ID seem to be suicide country. But wait, what about Texas? Not much gun control there, and a low suicide rate as well. The Northeast has lots of gun control with low suicide rates, but hold on, VT is in the upper echelon of suicide rates as well.

Perhaps correlation and causation are different things. What else could account for the difference in suicide rates besides guns? If you decide to commit suicide, a bottle of whiskey and a jar of sleeping pills are fairly easy to come by. Not having a gun in the house doesn’t mean that you can’t kill yourself. The more important factor seems to be access to mental health care.

From that same source, mental health care is easier to come by in urban areas than in rural areas. TX and CA both have the largest urban populations. All of those dark red states are mostly rural. They also have some pretty brutal weather.

So maybe it isn’t the guns. The calmatters.org article also presents this graph:

During the period that CA was dramatically increasing gun control, they saw their suicide rate increase significantly. The same article complains that they were defunding mental health care at the same time.

The same political movement that is telling us we must disarm because of suicides is in favor of euthanasia and abortion. If someone wants to commit suicide, isn’t “My Body My Choice” operable?

The next issue is how they are calculating the percentage of gun ownership. If a state like MT or AK doesn’t have a registry, there isn’t a way to track the percentage of gun ownership. You can look at sales data, but that doesn’t tell you whether the guns are distributed evenly across households. It could be that some households have a very large number of guns and others have none. While states such as CA, IL, and NY have registries, that doesn’t begin to show the true number of gun owners. By definition, they can’t track illegally owned guns. The anti-gunners also tell us that the illegal guns in these states come from states with lax gun control. Doesn’t that mean that they have more guns and we have fewer?

The next problem is that this “gun death” data also includes defensive gun uses. In 2019 there were 1,244 defensive gun deaths, so about 3% of the total. They even count the death of a mass shooter when an armed citizen stops them in their “gun deaths” number. What they don’t include are defensive gun uses that prevent any deaths, which happen 500,000 to 3,000,000 times per year (same cite). Defensive gun use quickly overwhelms any of the statistical tricks the anti-gunners can play.

But there’s one overwhelming argument that completely refutes the “guns are the problem” line of thinking. Disarming populations has been a hallmark of some of the worst cases of genocide in the previous century, and yet not one example exists where an armed population succumbed to this systematic violence:

1. Nazi Germany (1930s-1940s): The Nazis implemented strict gun control measures, particularly targeting Jewish citizens. This made it difficult for the persecuted minority to defend themselves during the Holocaust.
2. Soviet Union (1929): Gun control measures were implemented before the mass killings under Joseph Stalin’s regime, including the Great Purge and the Holodomor.
3. Turkey (1911): Gun control measures were put in place before the Armenian Genocide, where over 1 million Armenians were systematically killed by the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
4. Cambodia (1975): The Khmer Rouge regime imposed strict gun control measures before committing mass killings during the Cambodian Genocide, which led to the deaths of around 1.7 million people.

The antis are quick to point out that there are lots of advanced societies with strict gun control that haven’t had a genocide. That’s true, but they can’t name any genocides that occurred against an armed populace. Given that “gun deaths” are measured in the thousands and genocides are measured in the tens of millions, why take the risk? We can literally absorb 100 years of the current rate of gun deaths and not even approach what we’ve lost to genocide.

The antis will also claim that a genocide “can’t happen here.” The problem with this argument is that it already has happened here. The slaughter of Native Americans was preceded by their disarmament. The Trail of Tears (1838-1839), the California Genocide (1846-1873), the Sand Creek Massacre (1864), Wounded Knee (1890), and The Long Walk of the Navajo (1864) were all examples of what the US government has done to disarmed peoples.

Ah, but it couldn’t happen in this day and age! Really? Do you recall what leftists were saying not so long ago? They are perfectly willing to slaughter people on the other side of the political divide.

“Reeducation camps for those salvageable,” said another. Firing squad for irredeemable malcontents. Round up entire families to ensure the disease doesn’t spread.”

“No seriously…how *do* you deprogram 75 million people? Where do you start? Fox? Facebook? We have to start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan. Or the failures of Reconstruction in the South.”

That’s not from some random person on Twitter. It’s a DNC official. This isn’t an outlier, it’s the way a significant portion of the hard left speaks when they think they’re only among friends:

Only if they’re openly resisting the new order. I know it sounds bad but if the day ever comes and we overthrow capitalism then it’s not just the billionaires who’ll have to be executed, a lot of your average right wingers will have to be as well.

The Louisville shooter was willing to kill people to show the need for gun control. That’s how warped they are. It’s how far the people on the other side will go. They’re not coming from a respect for life. It’s about power.

The Betsy Ross Flag, The Gadsden Flag, and 2A Symbols might make you a Militia Violent Extremist. Or perhaps you’re Black. Or Catholic. Even Libertarians are possibly domestic terrorists these days. The idea that our government couldn’t decide to start sending people to reeducation camps or even wholesale liquidation is naïve. Of course it could happen here and now. The interest in gun control isn’t about saving lives. It’s about their agenda and who is in the way.

Sorry Mother Jones, I’m going to keep my guns.