Ryan McMaken: No Correlation Between Gun Ownership, Mass Shootings, & Murder Rates

While I was fact checking my previous article, I checked some correlation coefficients of my own so I didn’t have to rely on Volokh’s numbers as my only source.
I approached the data a little differently than Volokh did and instead of using a subjective ranking by an organization like the Brady organization, I just looked at the rate of gun ownership in the state. After all, the argument is often that more guns and more gun owners leads to more violence.
So, I looked at the correlation between the gun ownership rate (a percentage on the x axis) and the murder rate (n per 100,000 on the y axis) in each state. The visual result is this:

As you can see, there is no correlation. In fact, if you run the numbers, the correlations coefficient is 0.1, which suggests a negligible correlation, or none at all. The murder data is 2012 data from the Justice Department. The gun ownership rate data is from a 2015 report called “Gun ownership and social gun culture.”

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