Screenshot from MSNBC
Gun violence has been dominating the American landscape for some time now. In fact, according to a new survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly one in five adults has had a family member killed by a gun, including in homicides and suicides.
And about one in six adults has witnessed an injury from a shooting, the survey found.
So far this year, there have been at least 146 incidents of gun violence, according to the Gun Violence Archive, leaving more than 200 people dead and hundreds more injured, CNN reported. There were nearly 49,000 gun-related deaths in 2021, according to data from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
So which states have the most gun violence? Democratic-led blue states where there is a push for gun control or Republican-led red states, which tend to have more gun advocates?
Conservatives like to “paint Democratic states as crime-ridden warzones, but gun violence is worse in red states,” journalist Josh Marcus wrote in The Independent.
The murder rates in MAGA-voting states have surpassed those in blue-voting states every year since 2000, according to a recently released analysis by ThirdWay, a center-left think tank. Over the past 20 years, murder rates in red states have exceeded blue states by an average of 23 percent.
Four red states–Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri–have consistently made the top of the list for the highest murder rates, according to Third Way’s report, which analyzed homicide data for all 50 states from 2000 through 2020 using CDC data. The think tank also used the 2020 presidential election results to characterize “red states” from the “blue states.”
“Over this 21-year span, this Red State murder gap has steadily widened from a low of 9 percent more per capita red state murders in 2003 and 2004 to 44 percent more per capita red state murders in 2019, before settling back to 43 percent in 2020,” the report stated.
Third Way found that the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Donald Trump has exceeded the murder rate in the 25 states that voted for Joe Biden in every year from 2000 to 2020.
“Crime has historically been a very potent political issue. It’s also very anecdote driven,” Jim Kessler, Third Way’s executive vice president for policy, told Axios.
Photo: Screenshot from MSNBC
