Salon: 10 states where guns are most (and least) likely to kill people

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But blue states are far safer than red states, according new analyses of the most recent data. That’s because states with the most gun controls, which are almost all blue, tend to have fewer gun owners and fewer guns used in suicides, crime and domestic disputes.

Nearly two-thirds of all gun deaths are suicides. There, states with the highest gun ownership rates and loosest laws have the highest percentages of deaths this way. Otherwise, poverty is a major factor, correlating with gun violence.

“The five states with the highest per capita gun death rates in 2011 were Louisiana, Mississippi, Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana,” the Violence Policy Center (VPC) said in its latest analysis of federal statistics. “Each of these states has extremely lax gun violence prevention laws as well as a higher rate of gun ownership. The state with the lowest gun death rate in the nation was Rhode Island, followed by Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. Each of these states has strong gun violence prevention laws and has a lower rate of gun ownership.”

“The overwhelming trend is that the strong gun law states have seen dramatic declines in violence,” John Roman, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute, told 247wallst.com, which also reported on states with the most gun violence. “Weak gun law states have not seen the same decline.”

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The states that had the lowest levels of gun-related killings were in the Northeast and Midwest. According to VPC’s analysis, the 10 safest states were: Rhode Island, Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. But even those states had unacceptable levels of gun violence, VPC said, noting that the United States was far more violent than most Western industrialized nations.

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http://www.salon.com/2014/07/04/10_states_where_guns_are_most_and_least_likely_to_kill_people_partner/