As previously demonstrated, the hypothesis of “more guns = more deaths” not only is not true, but cannot be true historically in the United States. Despite that simple fact, “gun control” supporters still bitterly cling to the irrational notion that firearms are naught but the tools of murder and mayhem.
So let us humor them for a second. We know that the number of firearms in circulation in America has been steadily increasing for as long as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives has been tracking the relevant numbers. Likewise, the raw murder count in the States has dropped to numbers unseen since the 1960s.
However, what about the percentage of those murders committed with the assistance of a firearm? After all, if firearms’ only purpose is to murder other people, one would think that, even if the overall murder rate is going down, the percentage of murders that involved a firearm would be going up given the increased number of firearms in the country.
Right?
Well, as with many of the things “gun control” advocates purport to be “common sense”, the reality is a little more complicated:
The grey bars track the percentage of murders that were committed with the assistance of a firearm, and, as you can see, those bars do not come anywhere close to echoing the consistent climb of the number of firearms in the United States.
In fact, the trend line for the percentages is functionally level, with a slope of 0.0006, compared to the slope of 669.64 for the number of firearms in America. Oh, and yes, that does mean that, averaged over the past 20 years, at least 6,696,400 firearms have been produced in or imported into the United States every year.
Despite the nearly level trend line of the percentages, there does exist a correlation of 0.14784 between the number of firearms in the United States and the percentage of murders committed with the assistance of firearms. This is, however, a tremendously weak correlation, and given the very narrow range of percentages – a maximum of 64% and a minimum of 55% – it is certainly not enough to draw any kind of causal relationship.
So, could the increased number of firearms in public circulation lead to a higher percentage of murders involving those firearms? Based on the available data, yes, it is possible… but it has not been happening consistently yet.
Other Sources:
graphical representation 
Thanks for making your data available along with the charts. Very useful.
LikeLike
I confess that part of my motivations are self-serving – folks have caught where I made errors in the past, and it’s best to correct those quickly. But, in the end, if you can’t show you work, you don’t have much of an argument, and that’s the real reason :).
LikeLike