What is Gun Control's Effect on Gun Violence?

Hey Guys! Stu here. So in my last video I talked a little bit about how many people you might expect to be carrying a gun when you walk into a Walmart, comparing Utah to California. Today I want to talk about gun control in the United States and the effect it has on rates of violence. More specifically, gun violence. I'll talk about Utah and California again for the obvious reasons that Utah has the "worst" gun control legislation in the United States, according to the Brady Campaign, and California has the best. Well, what does having the worst gun control legislation mean really? Well, one of the biggest things that put us towards the bottom was the fact that Utah allows concealed carriers to carry guns and firearms into public schools. In fact, the law is specific in stating that it is actually illegal for a public school to have a policy that prevents anyone from carrying a firearm into a school. And so there's nothing a public school can do to prevent any legal concealed-carry permit holder from carrying a firearm into a public school. That might sound horrible, right? And it is. It's absolutely horrible. Ever since they passed that law there's been nothing but shootouts in schools all across the state, every single day, all the time, people dying left and right, just shootouts happening all over the place! It's like the freaking wild west out here! Within a few days, everybody's going to be dead in this state, because everybody's just killing each other, our gun laws are so bad! California? Best gun laws in the nation. Absolutely no gun violnce whatsoever. Now another state that has gun laws very similar to Utah is Arizona. They were ranked 2nd worst. And we're going to look at another state, Hawaii, which has some of the best laws according to the Brady Campaign. So if California and Hawaii, having really good gun laws, and Utah and Arizona having horrible, horrible gun laws, let's take a look at where each of these states rank in terms of gun violence. Now luckily Wikipedia -- because we know Wikipedia never lies, does it? -- Wikipedia has a ranking of states by levels of gun ***. So let's start with Utah's "worst" gun laws in the nation. Where do we rank? With the worst gun laws in the nation, we must rank highly in terms of gun ***, right? Or gun violence, right? Well, as a matter of fact we're actually tied with Maine and Idaho for 6th lowest gun violence in the nation in terms of gun murders. In other words, there's only 5 other states in the nation with a gun-*** rate lower than Utah. So despite having some of the worst gun laws in the nation, Utah actually has one of the lowest rates of gun ***. So let's compare that to California with the "best" gun laws. Where do they rank for gun murders? Well, turns out they rank 12th worst. Hm. So far, not looking very good for the gun-grabber argument that more gun control leads to less gun violence. But that's only looking at two different states. Let's take a look at Hawaii. According to the Brady Campaign, they rank 6th best in gun laws. Now if we were to make an assumption about gun crime in Hawaii based on what we know about Utah and California, we might expect Hawaii to also have a high rate of gun ***. But, as it turns out, they actually have the 3rd lowest gun-*** rate in the nation. That's even lower than Utah. Now if you think that's interesting, let's look at Arizona. With gun laws similar to Utah and their proximity to us, you might expect them to have a gun-*** rate right around the same as Utah. But where do they stand? Well, as it turns out, they're actually almost identical to California. So what we're seeing is California and Arizona having opposite philosophies on gun control, yet having very similar rates of gun crime, whereas Utah and Hawaii are also on opposite ends of gun control yet having similarly low rates of gun ***. So what does this tell us about gun control? We'll, we've only looked at 4 states so we can't really draw a very good conclusion from just that. But, if you ask me, gun control has little-to-nothing to do with the rates of violence in a given region. So if that's the case, why do California and Arizona have such high levels of gun violence while Utah and Hawaii are so low, despite having opposite views on gun control in those states? Well if I got into it too much this video could go on for hours and hours and I could cite study after study and show example after example of what it takes to reduce violence in a given area, but in a nutshell, I would say that levels of violence in a given region have more to do with the people who live in that region growing up being exposed to a violent environment and growing up to become violent, versus people who grow up in a peaceful environment growing up to be more peaceful than anything having to do with gun control or any sort of legislation, or anything to do with the proliferation or availability of certain tools that violent people might tend to use. Like I said, I could drone on for hours and hours about what it actually takes to reduce violence in a given area and produce more peacful regions, but for now I'm going to leave that to the philosophers, and I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions about the link between gun control and gun violence. Personally I think there is none, but that's for you to decide. That's all for now. Hope you enjoyed it and hope you learned something and maybe gave you something to think about. Until next time, have fun at the range and be safe out there.