Every year the Brady Campaign comes out with its state-by-state Brady score. Those of us who are active marksmen usually cringe because we know full well that a higher Brady score does not equate into increased gun safety. What is worse is that there are people that take the Brady agenda at face value and vote to implement Brady recommendations or worse: parrot this information along with their own anecdotal evidence on the matter.
My favorite sparring partner on gun control matters pointed out to me that my assertion that an increased Brady score does not increase gun safety was the same kind of anecdotal parroting I mentioned about the Brady people. OK, I will say crow needs ketchup.
So I tucked tail and went back to my cube to actually crunch some numbers. I compared the latest Brady scores by state with the number of gun homicides per 100K by state. Hmm, why isn’t Washington D.C. in the Brady report? We’ll get to that later. But for the sake of the graph, I went ahead and used California’s score +1 for D.C., when in all reality they would score higher since it was only a couple years ago (Supreme Court Case D.C. Vs. Heller) that the supreme court determined the second amendment should be applied there.
If we assume the Brady Campaign is right, states with a higher Brady score should have a lower gun homicide rate, let’s graph the numbers and see:
Can this be correct that Washington DC with the highest level of gun control has the highest amount of gun murders? Well, we can see why Washington DC isn’t rated by the Brady Campaign. At best, the Brady campaign has no effect on decreasing gun homicides.
What is most interesting are the states that the Brady Campaign said have “Crazy gun control laws”. These were Utah, Kansas Virginia and Florida. (Utah remains the only state where concealed and open carry on public college campuses is legal)
Why is it if these states are so crazy with their gun control laws, that they have among the lowest gun murder rates? Crazy Utah rates .91 gun murders per 100K of population. That means 40 states have more gun murders per year and all of them have higher Brady scores. It makes me wonder: What possible facts does the Brady Campaign use to justify implementing their recommendations?
It appears none.
