Just a reminder that claims about “enough guns for every person in the US” doesn’t really mean the same thing as every person actually having a gun. Also the distribution of ownership lends less credibilty to generalizations since there exists an unevenness to ownership patterns by state.
This is the problem of the slogan “better to have one and not need it than to need one and not have it”. Often spikes in gun purchases are by those who already own firearms which does not necessarily increase their individual potential for mayhem, OTOH the entire issue of straw purchases raises important issues for background checks if for no other reason than to serve as a distributional deterrent.
Yet one should not forget that the manufacture and sales of firearms is important to a variety of regional economies, and the licensing of such firms is also a regulatory issue, and yet the offshoring of small arms manufacturing or the complex international corporate ownership of firms does not get nearly enough scrutiny.
Of course illegal guns, unregistered guns, and their misuse including rationalized police killings and accidental discharge make the use of firearms more complicated in projecting the amount of risk one takes in the US as a citizenry with many guns in public ownership but perhaps not evenly distributed in terms of race and class, and certainly not according to gender.
What is different is a set of preferences that does not necessarily map onto ownership. For example three times as many South Carolinians own guns than those in New Hampshire or twice as many as those who live in Massachusetts and such claims make even less sense when thinking about risk depending on who you are and who you encounter or even more vaguely, what these individuals believe about those with whom they interact.
Gun use is not so much having it when you need it but thinking you need it when you don’t, much like gun-owning Burns, Oregon residents thinking that the visiting militia members wearing their guns openly and on their hip(s) was “rude”. With so many openly displayed guns around the Oregon Standoff, the only death was one person shot by the Oregon State Police.
More interesting is the ideological predisposition which would speak to the issue of a highly variable gun-dependency and of course not even suggest how LEOs use guns as opposed to non/less-lethal weapons, especially on POC.
What is important in the gun ownership discourse which is different than the actual gun use discourse is how the devil as always is in the details.
www.salon.com/…
1. New Hampshire leads the country in firearms-related jobs per capita, coming in at a stunning seven times that of Washington DC. The state also has the greatest total industry output per capita. Home to large-scale companies like Sturm, Ruger & Co., as well as smaller defense contractors, New Hampshire is peppered with gun and ammunition manufacturers. Notably, when it comes to gun ownership, New Hampshire comes in 47th in the country.
2. Idaho comes in right behind New Hampshire, with the second highest number of firearm industry jobs per capita. However, WalletHub places the state number one in overall gun dependence, thanks to its industry, gun prevalence and “gun politics” ranking. Notably, Idaho comes in 25th in the country in wages and benefits among those employed by the industry, raising questions about how ordinary people are faring amid the state’s heavy dependence. In 2013, Gov. Butch Otter infamously touted the state’s low wages in a bid to attract gun manufactuers.
WalletHub has its own national assessment of gun dependence, based on evaluation of the gun industry, politics and prevalence. Here is its ranking from most to least dependent.
- Idaho
- Alaska
- Montana
- South Dakota
- Arkansas
- Wyoming
- New Hampshire
- Minnesota
- Kentucky
- Alabama
- North Dakota
- West Virginia
- Mississippi
- Utah
- Indiana
- Oregon
- Colorado
- South Carolina
- Kansas
- Connecticut
- Tennessee
- Louisiana
- Missouri
- Wisconsin
- Vermont
- Nebraska
- New Mexico
- Texas
- Oklahoma
- Illinois
- Iowa
- Arizona
- Nevada
- Pennsylvania
- Florida
- Georgia
- North Carolina
- Massachusetts
- Virginia
- Ohio
- District of Columbia
- Washington
- Hawaii
- Maine
- Michigan
- California
- Maryland
- New York
- New Jersey
- Rhode Island
- Delaware
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