Does Your State Make The Grade?
Gun violence is a moral crisis in America. It’s also a public health crisis. Over a million people have been shot in the past decade, and 2017 saw not one but two of the deadliest mass shootings in our country’s history. Unlike other epidemics, gun violence persists not because we lack solutions, but because too many of our leaders lack the courage to stand up to the corporate gun lobby.
The situation is dire, but far from hopeless. As we’ve done for many years now, the attorneys at Giffords Law Center graded and ranked all 50 states on the relative strength or weakness of their gun laws in 2017. We found, like we do every year, a simple but undeniable correlation—states with strong gun safety laws have fewer gun deaths per capita than states with weak laws. In short, gun laws work. To truly address this crisis, more states must follow the example of their neighbors with high grades and pass the comprehensive gun safety laws proven to save lives.
Interested in learning more about this year’s Annual Gun Law Scorecard? Contact one of our experts.
Success in the States
With 25 states earning an F on this year’s Scorecard, there’s a lot of work to be done. The good news is that other states have already paved the way, testing the policies most effective at preventing gun violence and reaping lifesaving rewards. In fact, of the 10 states with the strongest gun laws, eight are also among the 10 states with the fewest gun deaths per capita. Many have only recently improved their laws—since the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012, over 210 new gun safety laws have been enacted in 45 states.
This year, 12 states increased their gun law scores over previous years. North Dakota, New Jersey, Nevada, Rhode Island, Tennessee, and Utah passed new domestic violence laws, while Oregon enacted an Extreme Risk Protection Order law. California, Connecticut, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York earned extra points for funding urban gun violence reduction programs, which are remarkably effective, non-legislative approaches to preventing shootings. Many states maintained their existing grades thanks to gun safety advocates, who successfully stopped 26 permitless concealed carry bills, 20 guns on campus bills, and 11 stand your ground bills.
Interested in the latest updates on state firearm legislation? Check out Gun Law Trendwatch.
How We Grade The States
Our attorneys have created a comprehensive grading rubric that assigns positive point values to gun safety policies, such as private-sale background checks and extreme risk protection orders, and negative point values to dangerous laws, such as permitless concealed carry. From there, we convert points to letter grades, rank the states, and compare our findings to the latest CDC gun death rates for each state. Every year, the same correlation emerges: high gun law grades are associated with low gun death rates and low gun law grades with high gun death rates.
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