Per the request of PD, I finally got around to this one.

I really struggled to find good data on this one. The best I could do was a Washington Post survey taken in 2001:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/he ... rship.html

One thing I noticed right away when I Excel'd this table was that their percentages were miscalculated. So the percentages I list here are different than this study, but not by that much.



Now, the first thing I noticed was that more rural states really got the short end of this. Since urban gun ownership is more of a concern, I wanted to compare these percentages with the percentage of urban vs. rural population.

Getting data for that was even harder. The best I could find was this survey, done in 1997 (so we're off in time by about 4 years, but hopefully that's not too damaging):

http://www.unmc.edu/rural/documents/pr9801.pdf

Here were the results of mixing those two:



You'll notice that some decidely urban states (New York, Illinois) aren't affected much by this, while others (hello, Texas and Michigan) were.

Also, it doesn't surprise me one bit that Utah would have the highest urban gun ownership. One of the mantras of the Mormons is to be prepared for anything, and usually that means protecting yourself with a gun.

If you can think of any other statistics to compare, let me know. I didn't do as good of a job on this one as I did on the religion or energy consumption ones.

Excel spreadsheet for work reference:

http://www.theskyiscrape.com/nick/guns/ownership.xls

Shouldn't Wyoming be greyed out on the second map?

Wow! Florida's pretty low. This must have been before they passed that law that lets you walk up to anyone you want to on the street and shoot them.

Actually, Montana beat out Wyoming for largest rural population.

Moral: don't mess with Texas, niggaz is STRAPPED son.

*fixed

I should move to Hawaii

I'm not at all suprised to see Michigan so high in urban gun ownership. Many, many people I knew in the Detroit area were avid hunters.

What did they hunt? Urban humans?

NOT FUNNI!

Blacks.

I think there's a slight flaw in the urban gun ownership scheme. Basically, you've taken the total percent of gun ownership and multiplied it by the % urban. This doesn't really take into account the possibility that rural areas may have higher gun ownership rates than urban--instead, it assumes that within an individual state, the same percentage of rural people have guns as urban. I'm not sure there's a more accurate way to do it without actually finding out the real urban (or rural) gun ownership in the state, but I just thought I'd point it out...

Yep, I realized this, but like you said, I can't think of a more accurate way to do it.

MY daddy did this study you jerks.

I couldn't find any actual data, but I modified your spreadsheet to at least show the effect that rural vs. urban gun ownership rates would have. Basically, in highly urban states it would have little effect, but in rural states, and higher rural-to-urban ownership rate would naturally result in a far lower urban ownership rate. The effect is most pronounced in the most rural states.

ftp://68.98.113.199/pub/ownership.xls -- hopefully that link works

Edit: I inserted a chart with a highly urban state (California), a highly rural one (Montana), and a middle of the road one (Indiana) with rural-to-urban ownership ratios in the range of 1 to 1.5. I would think the actual ratio for each state, while varying, would fall somewhere in that range. (1.5 meaning a 50% higher ratio of rural people own guns than urban)

That's interesting, I decided to factor in gun homicide and compare it to total gun ownership and the derived urban value. In the graph comparing gun ownership by state to gun homicide by state, there is absolutely NO correlation. So, any time someone comes up with two or three states and uses them as an argument for or against gun ownership, it's bunk.

The derived urban ownership number, on the other hand, shows at least a little correlation. It's still fairly scattered, and there are plenty of outliers, but there is at least a trend.

West Virginians love their guns! Check out this ad for the Republican candidate for U.S. Senate. If a Democratic candidate would have posed with a gun in his hand, he would have been called a terrorist by Republicans. Fortunately, Robert C. Byrd will probably be handing him his ass anyway despite being ancient.

I'm surprised with both Illinois and Florida's percentages