“It's not what you don't know that gets you in trouble, it's what you know for sure that just ain't so,” Mark Twain

The Conversation

On Wednesday Fred Dicker, the host of “The State of the Capital” on Albany radio station WGDJ and Republican Congresswoman Claudia Tenney had this exchange:

After wistfully remembering the old days when “we had state mental hospitals that locked these [severely mentally ill] people up,” Dicker continued, “Legal gun owners... tend to vote Republican. They tend to be white. Most gun crimes are occurring in what's euphemistically called the inner cities involving minorities, and they're the ones that Democrats generally are going to bend over backward to protect."

"Obviously, there's a lot of politics in it," said Tenney. "It's interesting that so many of these people that commit the mass murders end up being Democrats... but the media doesn't talk about that either."

The Data

The accompanying chart shows the 10 states with the least and the most gun violence. The rankings were produced by 24/7 Wall St. from information provided by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The Urban Column indicates the proportion of the state that is urban based on the last census. The two columns on the right show the percentage the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates received in each state in 2016.

State GUN VIOLENCE     URBAN     GOP     DEM

50 Massachusetts            92.0%      33.5%     60.8%

49 Rhode Island               90.7%.    39.8%.     55.4%

48 New York                     87.9%     37.5%.      58.8%

47 Hawaii                          91.9%     30.1%        62.3%

46 Connecticut                 88.0%    41.2%        54.5%

45 New Jersey                  94.7%     41.8%       55.0%

44 Minnesota                    73.3%     45.4%      46.9%

43 California                     95.0%     33.2%      61.5%

42 Maine                           38.7%     45.2%       47.9%

41 Washington                  84.1%      38.2%       54.4%

State GUN VIOLENCE     URBAN     GOP        DEM

10 South Carolina             66.3%      54.9%      40.8%

9 Arkansas                        56.2%      60.4%      33.8%

8 New Mexico                   77.4%       40.0%     48.3%

7 Missouri                         70.4%       57.1%       38.0%

6 Montana                        55.9%       56.5%      36.0%

5 Oklahoma                      66.2%       65.3%      28.9%

4 Mississippi                     49.4%       58.3%      39.7%

3 Louisiana                       73.2%        58.1%       38.4%

2 Alabama                        59.0%       62.9%      34.6%

1 Alaska                             66.0%      52.9%       37.7%

The Conclusion

1. The 10 states with the lowest levels of gun violence are overwhelmingly urban, with the single exception of Maine.
2. The 10 states with the most gun violence are far more rural, and all are well below the national average for urban dwellers of 80.7%.
3. All 10 states with the least gun violence voted for the Democratic presidential candidate, although two (Minnesota and Maine) did not give her a majority.
4. The 10 states with the highest levels of gun violence voted overwhelmingly for the Republican candidate.