Gun homicides alone cause 11 000 deaths each year. Numerous shootings in recent years, terrorist and otherwise, have sparked heated debates about gun control policy, particularly with regard to Second Amendment issues. Such discussions are more often than not driven by political and philosophical ideology, rather than empirical data. The self‐imposed ban on the dissemination of gun‐related statistics on the part of the Centers for Disease Control has created difficulty in obtaining data, particularly at the sub‐state level. Furthermore, the majority of previous research has not examined the effect on crimes that are gun specific, that is, homicides or robberies committed using guns versus all homicides or robberies. The objective of this research is to examine the multiple relationships between gun ownership and gun crimes at the sub‐state level and to then examine the effect of state‐level gun laws on the sub‐state relationships via multilevel modeling.
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