Which conservative states have the highest gun violence rates and what are their gun laws?

1. Which “conservative” states show the highest gun-death rates — the headline numbers

Analysts using CDC and other sources list Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, New Mexico and Alaska among the states with the highest overall gun-death rates in recent years; the Violence Policy Center’s 2023-focused analysis specifically named Mississippi, Louisiana and Alabama as having the highest rates ^[1]. Broad national trackers such as The Trace and the Gun Violence Archive document that shootings and gun deaths occur across all states, but regional patterns repeatedly highlight southern and some western states with elevated per-capita rates ^{[4] [5]}.

2. What “conservative” policy patterns these high-rate states tend to follow

Policy organizations that score state laws find that many high–gun-death states also have permissive statutes: permitless or constitutional carry, weaker requirements for background checks on private transfers, and fewer limits on magazine capacity or certain semi-automatic weapons; Everytown and Giffords both map stronger laws to lower death rates and weaker laws to higher rates ^{[2] [3]}. The Violence Policy Center’s framing also ties high state gun-death rates to “weak gun violence prevention laws and high rates of gun ownership” ^[1].

3. How researchers and advocates link laws to outcomes — correlation, not single-cause proof

Everytown and Giffords report consistent correlations: states with comprehensive packages of laws (universal background checks, extreme-risk laws, waiting periods, purchaser licensing) typically show lower gun-death rates in their comparisons, while states scored poorly by those groups tend to have higher rates ^{[2] [3]}. Those organizations and others stress that law strength is one factor among many — trafficking across state lines, local urban violence, poverty, and health-system differences also matter — but their repeated cross-state comparisons show a clear relationship between weaker laws and higher gun-death rates ^{[2] [3]}.

4. Contrasting viewpoints and political context

Gun-rights advocates and many conservative officials argue that more lawful gun ownership improves safety and that criminal behavior — not law-abiding owners — drives violence; in recent years many Republican-led states have expanded carry rights and limited liability for gun makers, reflecting that viewpoint ^{[6] [7]}. Media and law-center trackers document both this policy shift toward permitless/constitutional carry in many Republican states and the counterargument from gun-safety groups that those changes are associated with worse outcomes ^{[6] [2]}.

5. Examples of policy change and place-based nuance

Some conservative states have made laws that reduce liability for manufacturers or expand carrying rights (example: Tennessee’s 2025 law limiting certain lawsuits cited in industry reporting), emblematic of wider state-level deregulatory moves ^[7]. Yet there are exceptions and local complexity: a few states with relatively relaxed laws show lower-than-expected death rates because of regional effects or neighboring states’ laws, which Everytown explicitly notes ^[2]. Available sources do not provide a complete, state-by-state legal inventory alongside 2024–2025 death-rate tables in this dataset; for detailed per-state law matrices see Everytown’s and Giffords’ full scorecards ^{[2] [3]}.

6. Data limitations and what the sources agree/disagree on

Public trackers (Gun Violence Archive, The Trace) supply incident and death counts; policy groups (Everytown, Giffords, VPC) pair those data with legal scoring to argue that stronger laws save lives ^{[4] [5] [2] [3]}. All cited sources agree there is a notable relationship between law strength and death rates, but they differ in emphasis: advocacy groups present policy prescriptions tied to their scoring; other reporting highlights political resistance in Republican-led states and the complexity of causation ^{[2] [3] [6]}. Available sources do not mention an uncontested causal estimate that quantifies exactly how much each specific law would reduce deaths nationally beyond aggregated claims (for instance, Everytown’s projection of lives saved is their model output and should be read as such) ^[2].

7. What to watch next — policy and data signals

Watch state scorecards and quarterly data updates: Everytown and Giffords update their rankings and law maps annually and mid-year trend reports track new state laws; The Trace and Gun Violence Archive provide near-real-time incident tallies and quarterly summaries of shootings ^{[2] [3] [4] [5]}. Political dynamics matter: several Republican-led legislatures continue to expand carry rights even as some conservative governors and lawmakers occasionally back targeted safety measures — a split the press has documented ^{[8] [6]}.

If you want, I can pull the latest Everytown or Giffords state-by-state law score and the most recent per-capita gun-death rank for a specific conservative-leaning state (or a list of the top 10) and summarize that side-by-side with the key statutes in effect there.