By John A. Tures, Professor of Political Science, and Christiana Walker, Undergraduate, LaGrange College
Imagine there’s a gun policy that would appeal to members of both parties, and save nearly 20,000 lives per year. And it’s all about making Americans more “safe” from unwanted firearm use. Want to know more?
My research methods student Christiana Walker and I looked into states which provide tax incentives to purchase equipment that would keep guns safe, including gun safes. Such devices could also be trigger locks, or a system to store ammunition safely. Sometimes it’s a full tax break or tax credit, while in other cases, the state provides a sales tax discount for the person who purchases such items.
We found a study provided for the Oklahoma Senate that lists the 13 states providing such benefits. For some reason, the study only marks 12, but with a little artificial intelligence searching, we found the missing state. So there’s Washington, Minnesota, Michigan, Texas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Florida, Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Maine and New York.
We also looked at gun deaths across America from Visual Capitalist “Mississippi’s Gun Death Rate Is 7x Higher Than Hawaii’s” which looks at all cases from homicides to suicides. Christiana and I found that for the 13 states that provide gun safety tax breaks, and found 10.507 gun deaths per 100,000 residents. For the 37 states that don’t provide such breaks, they had 16.216 gun deaths per 100,000 residents. For those keeping score, our t-ratio was statistically significant at the .001 level.
There are 5.71 fewer gun deaths per 100,000 residents in states that provide those tax credits or sales tax exemptions for safety equipment, which does not count items that focus on displaying the weapon instead of securing. That may not seem like a lot. But if we adopted this policy across the country, for 324,000,000 Americans, that could lead to 18,698 lives saved, per year, which is like saving us from six 9/11 disasters.
Could this appeal to both sides? When I brought this up with a fellow church member who is retired law enforcement, and fairly conservative, he got excited.
“Could we make gun safety courses tax deductible?” he asked.
He was more interested in expanding the idea, rather than be skeptical of the plan.
I presented the idea before several Democratic Party members of the Georgia General Assembly and received an enthusiastic response. After all, it could possibly save up to 597 lives per year in the Peach State. The data was enough to convince Oklahoma, one of the most conservative states in the country, to back the measure. They’re now the 14th state to adopt such gun safety measures.
If Colorado adopted it, the statistics suggest, it could help save more than 330 lives annually in The Centennial State.
Over my life, I’ve had the misfortune to know about a series of preventable gun tragedies. And yes, having such tax breaks for gun safety devices doesn’t mean there won’t be any gun deaths. It means it is highly likely there will be much fewer gun deaths with these tax incentives available, based upon the evidence from the states. These tax measures have been approved by red states and blue states, as well as purple states.
Let’s do our part to keep firearm deaths down, especially accidents or mistakes involving children, but securing those weapons with tax free or tax reduced gun safety items.