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South Dakota Ranks Seventh in Gun Background Checks per Capita

By caheidelberger on 2013.01.06

Four years in, President Obama still hasn't taken away any of your guns. If you're an American, you probably have more guns than you did four years ago.

South Dakotans are among the most gun-acquisitive folks in the nation. According to the FBI's latest National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) data, South Dakota ranks seventh in firearm background checks. This stat isn't a perfect proxy for gun purchases: in some places, you can buy just one gun per background check, while in others, you can buy several.

But here are the ten states doing the most firearm background checks per 1000 residents:

State Total NICS firearm checks 2012 Population (est. 2012.07.01) checks per 1000 pop. rank check per 1000
Kentucky 2,589,358 4,397,606 588.8 1
Montana 134,455 1,006,555 133.6 2
North Dakota 84,867 691,286 122.8 3
West Virginia 225,580 1,859,382 121.3 4
Alaska 85,342 733,088 116.4 5
Wyoming 63,356 574,327 110.3 6
South Dakota 88,447 831,983 106.3 7
New Hampshire 128,178 1,321,476 97.0 8
Oklahoma 367,976 3,827,647 96.1 9
Alabama 431,356 4,831,351 89.3 10

And the ten least avid firearm-background-checking states:

State Total NICS firearm checks 2012 Population (est. 2012.07.01) checks per 1000 pop. rank check per 1000
Michigan 430,405 9,862,559 43.6 41
Florida 834,319 19,288,992 43.3 42
Delaware 30,724 916,618 33.5 43
Massachusetts 210,453 6,617,483 31.8 44
California 1,132,603 38,042,853 29.8 45
Maryland 136,604 5,874,250 23.3 46
Rhode Island 24,050 1,050,092 22.9 47
New York 338,619 19,527,371 17.3 48
Hawaii 17,428 1,388,801 12.5 49
New Jersey 85,851 8,851,553 9.7 50

The District of Columbia had just 449 NICS firearm checks last year, 0.7 checks per 1,000 population. There were 19.4 million firearm background checks across the fifty states and D.C. last year, an average of 61.9 checks per 1,000 Americans.

You can see the full data for 2012, including monthly check totals, on my spreadsheet:

Published in South Dakota

caheidelberger

6 Comments

  1. larry kurtz 2013.01.06

    Lower the drinking age and age of consent to 6. It's less upsetting when kids get shot if we think of them as adults. #NRAideas RT @AllYouCanEatMe

  2. WayneB 2013.01.07

    Cory,

    I pulled 2011 FBI UCR stats for these states. For some reason, Florida & Alabama didn't report. However, the average firearm murder per 1000 pop for the top 10 background check states was 0.016. In the bottom 10, it was 0.023. (Remember, SD had 0.006 firearm murders per 1000 pop.)

    At a 95% confidence level, there is no statistical significant difference between the two averages. If you can find me 2011 firearm checks, I can have a more valid comparison... but realistically, the number of firearm background checks doesn't appear to have an influence on firearm murders one way or the other.

    If we look deeper into the data, 4 of the 10 states with the highest checks are below 0.01 firearm murders per 1000 pop (ND, MT, SD, NH highest to lowest).

    Only 2 of the states in the bottom 10 are below 0.01 firearm murders per 1000 pop (Rhode Island and Hawaii, which is the safest place to live at 0.0007!)

    I may try throwing out outliers later and see what happens.

  3. caheidelberger Post author | 2013.01.08

    Interesting, Wayne! The FBI-NICS link at the top includes annual by-state reports for every since 1998. If we don't find correlations between background checks and gun deaths, does that mean guns don't increase that risk... or does it mean that guns don't decrease that risk?

  4. WayneB 2013.01.08

    If we don't find correlations, we don't find correlations. From the 2012/2011 data, there's no indication higher incidence of background checks spurs firearms murders. Nor, at face value, does it seem to decrease murders... though again we note how many states in the top 10 have fewer than 0.01 deaths per 1000 population compared to the bottom 10, so there may be something to tease out of the data yet.

    Remember we're talking about background checks. Ownership & firearm homicides are better stats to track if we want to address your question about guns & risk. We know that some of the states with the most per-capita firearms (the upper Midwest) have the lowest per capita homicide rates. Without delving into the numbers, I couldn't tell you if the difference is statistically significant.

    If firearms neither increase nor decrease the risk of homicide, then really neither the pro- or anti-gun lobbies have much room to stand on when it comes to their "guns cause X" or "guns prevent X" arguments, and we as a society should tell them to shut up and forget about worrying about the weapon. Instead, we should be focusing on who is wielding the weapon.

    Then again, according to that Mother Jones article, we'd be much better off if we devoted our effort to lead pollution mitigation, rather than wasted our energy arguing about what might or might not make up for a fraction of a percent of the cause of a fraction of all crimes.

  5. caheidelberger Post author | 2013.01.09

    I'd be happy to split the difference and move on to other issues. Declare guns neither a problem nor a solution. Get people to stop focusing on expanding gun possession as public policy, stop living in fear, and focus on bigger social and environmental factors that we should address to make ourselves safer and healthier.

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