Shooting News Weekly linked to a recent piece from Janice Turner with the London Times entitled "No, I don’t want to keep a gun by my bed." The gist of her article is that the relatively high murder rates in the U.S. compared to the UK are because of guns. She uses as an example the much higher murder rate in Washington D.C. compared to that of London.
Well, let me offer a counter example. In Boise, Idaho, where I live, the murder rate is 1 per 100,000 even though rates of gun ownership are very high. Although I can't find statistics for Boise in particular, in Idaho overall, 60% of households have at least one firearm (and the vast majority of those probably have much more than just a single firearm--in fact, I don't believe I know anyone who owns firearms that only has just one). If Turner's hypothesis had any merit, Boise would present a bloodbath instead of having a lower murder rate than even her beloved U.K.
Similarly, Washington D.C. has one of the lowest gun ownership rates in the United States. Thus, if Turner's hypothesis was correct, it should have an extremely low murder rate compared to the rest of the United States. Instead, in 2023, it has a murder rate of 39.4 per 100,000, although this has supposedly declined in 2024 and 2025.
The reality is that the correlation between firearms and murder rates is so low that there is effectively no correlation.
But there is a high correlation between murder rates and certain racial classifications. But people like Turner won't ever discuss that because truth is anathema to them. They would rather push the anti-gun lies because they want to disarm those they consider peasants.
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