But a key challenge for researchers in this area is that direct measures of state-level firearm ownership exist for only a few years. As a result, studies have relied on proxy measures, such as the proportion of suicides in which a firearm is used. These proxy measures may be strongly influenced by factors other than the rate of gun ownership and may not have a constant relationship with gun ownership over time. So, to support research in this area, RAND developed a longitudinal database of state-level estimates of household firearm ownership from to These estimates are derived from a statistical model that draws on a wide range of survey and administrative data sources associated with household gun ownership.
This database was first released in and is available free to the public. Researchers can use these annual, state-level measures of household gun ownership rates to test theories about the relationship between gun ownership and crime, injury, and public policy. This map presents the average proportion of adults living in a household with a firearm, between and But when you compare the United States with nations like Britain and Japan, it becomes clear that firearm ownership contributes to America's murder problem.
The American firearm homicide rate is about 20 times the average among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries excluding Mexico. Harvard researchers Daniel Hemenway and Matthew Miller examined 26 developed countries and checked whether gun ownership correlated with murder rates.
They found that "a highly significant positive correlation between total homicide rates and both proxies for gun availability. Interestingly, these results tended to hold true even when you exclude the United States and its super-high homicide and gun-ownership rates. Another study, by Berkeley's Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins , found that the US has crime rates comparable to those in similarly developed countries, but much higher rates of lethal violence — owing in significant part to our high rates of gun ownership.
A recent, highly sophisticated study found that once you control for general crime rates and other confounding factors like poverty, "each 1 percentage point increase in proportion of household gun ownership" translated to a 0.
A meta-analysis — study of studies — found a strong consensus among researchers that access to guns correlated with higher homicide rates in the United States. So it seems very, very likely that the US's exceptional rate of firearm ownership is contributing to its exceptionally high murder rate.
That's one reason why, despite the fact that the homicide rate is falling sharply both inside the United States and around the world , America has a much bigger homicide problem than the rest of the developed world. Our mission has never been more vital than it is in this moment: to empower through understanding.
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