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Few issues divide US Americans as sharply as guns. Debates over the Second Amendment, who has the right to own a firearm, and how to keep communities safe show up nearly every election season. A widely shared social media post has resurfaced, reviving an old claim: that Republican-leaning areas of the United States have higher rates of gun ownership but see lower levels of gun violence. On the other hand, the post alleges that Democratic-leaning states have fewer guns but experience more gun violence.
Claim: “97% of all guns are in the red territory. 97% of all gun violence is in blue” appears over a map of the US with states shaded red (Republican) and blue (Democrats). Posted on TikTok, it got over half a million views. I It was also shared on Facebook and Instagram in recent weeks.
DW Fact check: False
No credible evidence backs either percentage, and the map has nothing to do with guns or gun violence.
The posts provide no source for the map. However, a reverse image search suggests it likely originated from a map published in January 2017, showing the results of the 2016 presidential election by congressional district. Districts won by Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, are red, while those won by Hillary Clinton, the 2016 candidate for the Democrats, are shown in blue.
The latest available figures from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(CDC) show that several mostly Republican-leaning states have some of the highest rates of homicide by firearm in the country: Mississippi recorded the highest age-adjusted firearm death rate in the country, at 15.7 deaths per 100,000 people Age-adjusted means the figures have been statistically adjusted so that a state’s older population structure doesn’t artificially inflate its rate.
Luisiana followed at 14.3, ahead of Alabama at 11.4, and Missouri at 9.3. Several of the states with the highest firearm death rates have consistently voted Republican in recent presidential elections. However, the data does not support a simple red-versus-blue divide.
The Pew Research Centerused CDC data from 2024 to map firearm death rates across the United States. The resulting map looks very different from the one circulating in the viral post, showing wide variations in gun death rates from state to state.
Gun death also includes suicide by firearm
Not all firearm deaths are homicides. Suicide accounts for a substantial share of gun deaths in the US. A map of firearm homicides would not necessarily look like a map of firearm suicides or total firearm mortality.
When nonfatal shootings are included, firearm violence also does not appear to be driven solely by whether a state is Republican- or Democratic-led. The Gun Violence Archive uses a broader definition that counts shooting incidents resulting in injuries, not just fatalities.
DW Fact Check examined the database and, again, found no clear connection between nonfatal shooting incidents and the partisan lean of a state. The highest numbers of reported shootings resulting in injuries but not deaths were recorded in Illinois, Texas, California and Pennsylvania, a mix of Republican- and Democratic-leaning states.
However, the database reports raw incident totals rather than rates adjusted for population. As a result, more populous states will naturally record more cases. Without accounting for differences in population size, these figures are not suitable for comparing or ranking states against one another.
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Can we reliably say where the guns are?
Pinning down where America’s guns are located is hard. The country has no national registry showing how many privately owned firearms sit in any given county or congressional district.
Since 1986, federal law has barred the government from keeping a national registry of guns or gun owners. Researchers rely on surveys and estimates of how many households have a gun, which is not the same as counting the guns themselves.
Estimates from the RAND Corporationsuggest that some of the highest levels of household gun ownership were found in Montana, where roughly 64% of adults lived in a household with a firearm between 2012 and 2016. Wyoming (60%) and Alaska (59%) followed closely behind.
The numbers show big differences between states, but they can’t tell us what share of the nation’s guns are in Republican-voting areas. People could buy a gun in one state and then move it across state lines.
The FBI actually discourages ranking locations or making comparisons as a way of measuring law enforcement effectiveness, since the data are not always comparable or complete and also since crime is a sociological phenomenon influenced by a variety of factors.
Without a reliable count of firearms in the areas shown on the viral map, there is no sound basis for the claim that 97% of the country’s guns are concentrated in “red” territory.
