GUNSDo Gun Regulations Equal Fewer Shootings? Lessons From New England
Gun rights advocates often point to low rates of shootings in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont to argue that you don’t need strong gun laws to keep violence in check. Here’s what the data actually reveals.
In February, as the New Hampshire House of Representatives debated a bill to prohibit guns in school zones, a gun owner opposed to the bill stepped up to the dais and handed the committee members a printed table of data showing violent crime rates in New England over two decades.
“Incidence of violent crime in New Hampshire, with a one-year exception, has been among the three lowest incidences nationwide,” the man, Jay Simkin, told the committee. “We live in a very, very safe state. And if you look at the line of data for Massachusetts, it shows that the incidence … has been at least twice that of New Hampshire.”
“If gun control laws were beneficial,” he continued, “one would have thought that would be obvious in Massachusetts because, periodically, they add to the volume of their laws.”
That bill, along with several other gun reform measures introduced during the 2023 session, didn’t pass. Simkin’s testimony to the committee echoed a frequent line of argument from gun rights proponents, who often point to states like New Hampshire, Maine, and Vermont to argue that states don’t need strong gun laws to have low rates of violence.
Recent events have brought a new sense of urgency to these discussions. In the waning months of 2023, the region experienced an unsettling series of high-profile shootings: a mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine, in October that killed 18; the shooting of three Palestinian students in Burlington, Vermont, in November, which is being investigated as a hate crime; and a shooting at a psychiatric hospital in New Hampshire the same month. These events serve as stark reminders that, despite low overall rates of violent crime, no community is immune to gun violence.
A reader named George submitted a question related to this issue to our Ask The Trace series: “Generally, states, as well as nations, from the data I’ve seen, with higher gun restrictions have lower deaths from guns. Why are these few New England states an exception?” Another reader asked, more generally: “Is it true that the states with the strictest gun laws have the lowest rates of gun violence? Gun control opponents often claim the opposite is true.”
Below, we’ll look specifically at these three northern New England states, their southern New England neighbors, and where they all fall within the national landscape of gun ownership, gun laws, and gun deaths.
