The American Right’s Self-Inflicted Gun Violence Crisis

Conservative America was shaken this week when Charlie Kirk, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University. 

The incident recalls a disturbing pattern: Even the champions of “pro-gun” politics are not immune to America’s epidemic of gun violence. 

Just last year, Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Four decades ago, Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin. More recently, in 2017, a far-left gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice, critically wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. From Gerald Ford, who survived two separate assassination attempts in one month in 1975, to local GOP staffers dying in common gun crime, the list of right-wing political figures hit by gun violence is a long one.

These bloody episodes underscore a grim irony: The very politicians and pundits who promulgate expansive gun rights and tough-on-crime rhetoric have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of bullets.

These attacks have grabbed headlines, but there are other conservative victims of gun violence whose stories often go unmentioned — many of them. They are the rank-and-file of the GOP, the voters who put the elected officials in office and follow the likes of Kirk on social media. 

It is the residents of conservative America — the so-called “red states” — who are suffering the heaviest toll in daily gun deaths.

Gun Violence Gap

Despite rhetoric painting liberal big cities as lawless war zones, the most dangerous places in America in terms of gun violence are often deep-red states and rural towns.

Federal health data reveal that states with conservative leadership consistently have higher firearm death rates than their blue-state counterparts. 

In 2021, eight of the 10 states with the highest gun death rates per capita were won by Trump in the 2020 election. Mississippi — with a staggering 33.9 per 100,000 firearm death rate, the worst in the nation — voted solidly Republican. By contrast, states with the lowest gun death rates — like Massachusetts, at 3.4 per 100,000 — reliably vote Democratic.

This pattern holds nationwide. Public health research confirms that states in the South and Mountain West with weaker gun laws and higher gun ownership have the highest gun death rates, whereas Northeast states with strong gun safety laws see far fewer deaths. 

In other words, the “gun-friendly” policies of red America correlate with more funerals and grieving families, year after year.

Crucially, this gap isn’t just about suicides in isolated areas; it extends to violent crime and murders as well. A recent analysis of homicide data found that the murder rate in Republican-voting states — such as Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama — was 33 percent higher than in Democratic-voting states in both 2021 and 2022.

Even when researchers control for big urban centers, the red-state murder problem persists. Remove the largest city from every red state, and their homicide rate still far exceeds that of blue states. 

The notion that “Democrat-run cities” alone drive violence collapses under scrutiny. People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.

People are statistically safer in New York City or San Francisco than in many rural or Southern Republican-led states.

A groundbreaking study also found that firearm fatalities are now more likely in small rural towns than in big cities — a reversal of historical trends. Thanks largely to soaring gun suicides, the most rural counties experienced overall firearm death rates 25 percent higher than the most urban counties in recent decades. That means the archetypal “American heartland” — often solid Republican territory — quietly endures a higher per-capita burden of gun death than metropolises like Los Angeles or New York.

The carnage encompasses tragic self-inflicted shootings, domestic violence with firearms, and, yes, the mass shootings that now regularly strike church gatherings, small-town Walmarts, and school classrooms in conservative communities. 

No corner of the country is spared, but red America is bleeding most.

Paradox of Pro-Gun Politics

Why do those who govern the most gun-afflicted states seem least inclined to acknowledge the crisis?

Republican leaders have long styled themselves as the party of “law and order,” yet they preside over what one analyst dubbed a “red state murder problem.” They champion the Second Amendment as a sacred pillar of freedom, but fail to target root causes that contribute to homicide and suicide rates that dwarf those in other advanced nations. 

The Trump administration’s response to violence has instead been to deploy federal agents into conducting roving patrols in democratic strongholds such as Washington to help enforce some of the country’s most restrictive gun laws. Meanwhile, Trump and the GOP are hobbling the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives by leaving it without a leader; legalizing fully automatic simulation devices; and cutting key research into understanding and preventing violence. 

It’s a cruel paradox. The right wing’s permissive gun policies have boomeranged to haunt their own constituents and politicians.

When even a figure like Kirk — who once declared that more armed citizens make us safer — ends up bleeding from a bullet wound, it highlights how indiscriminate and all-encompassing America’s gun scourge has become. 

The victims are subsequently left with no solace. This year, the Trump administration shut down the White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and slashed $158 million in gun violence prevention grants.

Rather than face the uncomfortable reality that easy access to firearms, poor gun trafficking controls, and under-resourced research is fueling more death in red states, GOP officials often deflect to problems in blue cities or pin violence on mental health alone. The numbers, though, don’t lie. 

Those “pro-life” conservative lawmakers have effectively enacted policies that make their communities less safe, with more grieving parents, more emptied school desks, and more devastated towns as the predictable outcome.

Bullets Know No Politics

It’s increasingly apparent that the right wing’s embrace of guns has exacted a disproportionate price on its own side. From the would-be assassins targeting GOP presidents to the quiet epidemic of firearm suicide among rural white men — a demographic that leans conservative — American gun culture is, in a dark twist, victimizing the very communities that most fiercely defend it.

If this country is going to surmount its gun violence crises, it must confront an uncomfortable truth: The people of red America are not being protected by the gun-centric promises of the far right — they are being buried by them. 

How many more Republican politicians must be rushed to the ER with gunshot wounds? How many small-town obituaries must quietly note a firearm tragedy, before ideology yields to reality? 

The right’s reflexive answers to any shooting — more patrols, militarized police, more guns, and less firearm regulation — are looking less like freedom and more like a death pact. Until conservatives reckon with this it, the cycle will continue. The communities they lead will continue to suffer the highest rates of murder and suicide, and even their most venerated leaders will remain in the line of fire. 

In the end, America’s gun violence crisis is not a red or blue issue. Right now, however, red America is paying the steepest price. The hope is that acknowledging this truth could spur the kind of cross-partisan soul-searching and reform that has so far proved elusive. 

Until then, the grim paradox persists. The loudest champions of an absolutist gun culture are among its foremost casualties.