In the ongoing debate over crime rates and gun control, one of the most common claims made by the left is that gun crime is worse in red states.
During a Senate hearing this week, a so-called gun expert from Yale made the very same argument.
“Why do you think that Chicago has become America’s largest outdoor shooting range?” Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) asked Dr. Megan Ranney from Yale’s School of Public Health. “Do you think it’s because of Chicago citizens who have no criminal record but who have a gun in their home or perhaps for hunting, or do you think it is because of a finite group of criminals who have rap sheets as long as King Kong’s arm?”
“Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri actually have higher firearm death rates,” Ranney replied.
This claim is not true.
Billy Binion, the associate editor at Reason magazine, debunked Ranney’s claim in a post on X/Twitter. “Some recent stats: Mississippi’s gun homicide rate: ~13 murders per 100,000 people; Louisiana’s gun homicide rate: ~15 murders per 100,000 people; Missouri’s gun homicide rate: ~11 murders per 100,000 people; Chicago’s gun homicide rate: ~29 murders per 100,000 people.”
Did you notice how Kennedy was talking about the city of Chicago? Ranney responded by comparing a blue city to three red states. There’s a reason why Ranney sought to compare Chicago, Ill., to the state of Mississippi instead of its capital, Jackson; or to the state of Louisiana instead of the cities of New Orleans and Baton Rouge; or to the state of Missouri instead of St. Louis or Kansas City—all of which are typically ranked among the most dangerous cities in the country.
Now, what if Ranney actually meant that Mississippi, Louisiana, and Missouri—all red states—have higher firearm death rates than the blue state of Illinois?
These three red states indeed have higher homicide rates than Illinois, but, as Zack Smith of the Heritage Foundation notes, “State-level murder rates are highly misleading” because crime rates are more a reflection of local law enforcement factors. In fact, when you take out the blue cities from both red and blue states, the resulting crime rate for the states drops dramatically.
“Anybody knows that law enforcement is overwhelmingly a local issue,” John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Fox News Digital. “How much money you spend on police, what the police policies are going to be are decided locally. District attorneys are almost always elected locally. Judges are almost always elected locally. Who gets arrested, who gets charged, how you prosecute the cases, and the judges that make the decisions on sentencing are all local decisions.”
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“You can look at either all counties or counties over 100,000, or I could give you one for counties over 200,000 or whatever and you see that the Biden counties had significantly higher murder rates. And, even in 2020, the reason why the Trump states had a higher murder rate that year was because the Biden counties had really high murder rates relative to the Republican counties,” Lott said. “So, I don’t know how anybody with a straight face can get away with not recognizing that law enforcement and punishing criminals generally is overwhelmingly decided locally.”
Lott also accused Ranney of being deliberately misleading in her testimony.
“She’s supposed to be an academic, and I just think it shows political bias to selectively pick a couple of states,” Lott said. “I mean, I could just pick the states with the very lowest crime rates, and they tend to be very Republican ones. Rather than selectively picking some portion of a sample, you try to look at the whole sample that’s available rather than cherry-picking some stuff.”
No matter how hard the left tries, they can't pretend that gun crime is a red state or even a red county problem. That they consistently ignore the facts in favor of their preferred narrative tells you they are not serious about the issue.
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