Regulating guns at the federal level will do more to stop gun homicides than prayer
Making our nation more Christian is not how to solve the United States’ problems with gun homicide.
In the Idaho Statesman on June 26, Loren Yadon, a Boise pastor, published a faith piece. The piece argued that the decreasing Christian influence on schools, private life and implicitly the nation results in mass shootings like the one that recently occurred in Uvalde, Texas.
Yadon contends that increasingly regulating guns will do nothing to stop these mass killings: “There (are) no…laws we can enact or agencies we can mobilize to protect our children from people without conscience.” To Yadon, prayer would contribute more to stopping school shootings than almost anything else. Ainsley Earhardt of Fox and Friends has given a similar opinion.
Yadon is correct in noting that Christianity is less a part of American life than it used to be. A Pew Research poll found that 63% of the population was Christian in 2021, but in 2011 the percentage was 75%.
Moreover, the homicide death rate by guns has recently increased. According to the CDC, the proportion of people killed via gun homicide in the United States increased from 2019 to 2020: from 4.6 to 6.1 per 100,000 people.
Yadon neither misjudges the increasing prevalence of gun violence nor the shrinking ratio of Christians to non-Christians in this country.
Yet correlation does not equal causation.
For example, Canada has an equal percentage of Christians to the United States. Statistics Canada, the national statistical office of the country, reports that 63% of Canada was Christian in 2019. This percentage of Christians is equal to the United States’.
The number of people per 100,000 who died by gun deaths (which includes suicides and accidents) in Canada in 2016 was 2.1, according to research by the University of Washington professor Mohsen Naghavi. Comparatively, the United States’ ratio of gun deaths per 100,000 was 10.6 in the same year.
Although Naghavi’s calculation may be out of date and does not represent only gun homicides, WHO data from 2010 shows a smaller proportion of gun homicides in Canada than in the United States.
In an analysis of the WHO statistics, University of San Francisco professor Erin Grinshteyn notes, “The U.S. firearm homicide rate was 7 times higher than that of…Canada (3.6 vs 0.50 deaths per 100,000 population).” If the United States’ lack of Christianity causes increased gun homicides, then would Canada, a religiously similarly proportioned nation with an alike culture and per capita, not also have a nearly identical percentage of gun homicides?
One significant difference between the United States and Canada’s treatment of guns is that Canada has stricter gun laws sanctioned at the federal level. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police note that gun owners in Canada almost always must have gun licenses; those wanting gun licenses must pass safety courses; and Canada has several types of weapons (semi-automatic weapons, center-fire rifles or shotguns with certain barrel lengths) that the nation heavily restricts.
In contrast, many states such as Texas have fewer restrictions on gun ownership. The Texas State Library says that Texas does not require licenses to carry a handgun, and “Texas law does not specifically put restrictions on who can carry a long gun such as a rifle or shotgun.” According to the CDC, Texas’s death rate by guns was 14.2 in 2020, about 7 times higher than the 2016 recording of Canada’s death rate by gun.
The United States should try to replicate Canada’s comparatively successful federal regulation of firearms rather than turn to prayer to stop further mass shootings.
Edward Dorey is a Boise State alumnus with a degree in English with a literary emphasis.
