Gun control advocates often contend that more gun deaths occur when guns are abundant in society.  The statistics they use to make the case are not persuasive.  The most commonly cited evidence for the linkage is that the states with higher gun death rates also tend to be the states in which gun owners are a higher percentage of the population. The scatter plot in Figure 1 compares the gun death rate to the gun ownership rate.  One can readily see that states with lots of gun-owners also tend to have high gun death rates.  It is not a perfect relationship, but any objective observer will accept that the scatter plot suggests a linkage. The problem is that gun control advocates often treat this scatter-plot as prima facie evidence when in fact it suggests only a possible relationship.  Because this statistical "science" appears to support their theory, gun control advocates rarely care to look into the matter any...(Read Full Article)