It&#x27;s genuinely hard.  You have to go to a granularity of counties at minimum, and pro-gun John Lott is the only guy I know who&#x27;s done that.<p>E.g. look at this by state and hit the column sorting buttons: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gun_violence_in_the_United_States_by_state" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Gun_violence_in_the_United_Sta...</a><p>Maryland, which I lived next to while in Arlington, VA for a dozen years, and Missouri where I was born, raised, and have retired to, have very similar statistics with very different gun control regimes.  Just looked at racial makeup on their separate state pages, and Maryland has almost 3 times the percentage of blacks, which would not at all support a thesis that they&#x27;re generically overly prone to murder with guns.<p>Or look at Joplin, and at the other end of I-44, which replaced Route 66, is St. Louis, just now the murder capital of the US.  Night and day, same gun control laws or lack thereof, e.g. no more difficult to buy them than anywhere else in the US and easy to obtain concealed carry licenses.