Wednesday’s narrow defeat of South Dakota Senator John Thune’s amendment that would have allowed gun owners to carry their weapons across state lines provided they “have a valid permit or if, under their state of residence” they “are entitled to do so, comes on the heels of a May 6, 2009 report from the Violence Policy Center which showed that states with higher gun ownership rates and weak gun laws have the highest rates of gun death.

The report was based on recently released 2006 national data from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control and received little coverage when it was released.

The five states with the highest per capita gun death rates were Louisiana, Alabama, Alaska, Mississippi, and Nevada. Each of these states had a per capita gun death rate considerably higher than the national per capita gun death rate of 10.32 per 100,000. Ranking last in the nation for gun death was Hawaii, followed by Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New York.

According to the Violence Policy Center, the states with the highest per capita gun death rates had lax gun laws and higher gun ownership rates. By contrast, states with strong gun laws and low rates of gun ownership had far lower rates of firearm-related death.

The VPC defined states with weak gun laws as “those that add little or nothing to federal restrictions and have permissive concealed carry laws allowing civilians to carry concealed handguns.” States with strong gun laws were defined as “those that add significant state regulation in addition to federal law, such as restricting access to particularly hazardous types of firearms (for example, assault weapons), setting minimum safety standards for firearms and/or requiring a permit to purchase a firearm, and have restrictive concealed carry laws.”

If you recall your courses in statistics, you know that correlation between two variables does not automatically imply that one causes the other or that correlation proves causation. Still, the VPC report is worth noting, though I suspect it had little impact on Senators voting for or against the Thune amendment. Votes in what was once the most thoughtful and deliberative body of Congress are today primarily based on political cover, the next election cycle, and campaign contributions from lobbyists rather than data.

You can read the press release from the Violence Policy Center and find a link to the report and state rankings at http://www.vpc.org/press/0905gundeath.htm