Last year’s edition of this post adequately explained the methods and reasons behind this post, so feel free to skim it if you need a refresher. The sources remain the same:
- FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports for 2014 (documenting, well, crime)
- Centers for Disease Control (providing the population of the US)
- Small Arms Survey of 2003 (I use their 2003 estimate as the start-point for my estimation of the total firearms in the US)
- BATFE’s Firearms Commerce in the United States (predictably, they track the number of firearms manufactured or imported into the US)
- Radical Gun Nuttery (despite the site’s name, they keep an accurate count of May-Issue/Shall-Issue/Constitutional-Carry states)
So, with another year of data under our belt, does my answer to the hypothesis of “more guns = more ‘gun violence’” change?
Nope.
The short answer is that the rate of firearm ownership correlates with the rate of crimes committed with a firearm with a coefficient of -0.57582, showing a negative correlation between the two.
Likewise, the raw number of firearms in private hands correlates to the raw number of crimes committed with a firearm with a coefficient of -0.44568, also indicating a negative correlation between these two data sets.
In a shock to no one, the hypothesis of “more guns = more ‘gun violence'” still cannot be true.
As always, please feel free to check my work (*.xlsx file).
graphical representation 
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