Alabama The Violent

You may have read our posting here on May 8th about a Press-Register story that reported Alabama ranks second in the nation for gun deaths. This morning's Montgomery Advertiser did its own version of the story, which heavily emphasised the accidental shootings, and included a quote from a local gun merchant:

Alabama's culture, history and wide expanses of rural areas add up to mean a lot of people in the state own firearms, said the owner of a local gun store. The study backed up his assertion, showing that 57.2 percent of Alabama households own guns. "Alabama is rural," said Alan Daniels Jr. of Collectors and Shooters LLC. "Every one of the top states, except Nevada, are agrarian, agricultural, wooded and heavily focused on hunting and outdoor sports."

Yet Alabama is not a rural state. According to a University of Alabama report in 2003, the 2000 Census showed Alabama's population to more urban than rural:

"The Census Bureau says that 55 percent of Alabama’s population lives in an urban setting and 45 percent lives in rural areas."

And just having a lot of unpopulated land can't have any impact on the gun death rate because as we all know, acres don't kill people, people kill people. Explaining our high gun death rate by saying it's just rural folks owning more guns doesn't wash. It can't be a lack of punishment for the bad guys with guns. We have the 4th highest per-capita prison population in the U.S. So why do we have such a high rate of gun deaths?