Interesting gun statistics

Having mentioned the statistics on per capita gun ownership in this post, I started playing around a bit with the numbers. What I had was a list of per capita gun ownership by state. Add state population to that, and I could figure out how many gun owners there were per state. Add land area to that, and I could figure out the density of gun owners.

These make for some pretty interesting statistics. Sure, Texas leads the country in total number of gun owners at 8.9 million, but California is close behind at 8.5 million, a good 4 million ahead of Florida (4.5 million.) But for density, New Jersey has them all beat, at 144 per square mile, followed by Rhode Island (129), Maryland (124), Connecticut (121), Delaware (116), and Massachusetts (106.) Not really the top of the list for gun-friendly states. Sure, most of the gun-friendly states have lots of wide open space, but it still makes for an interesting perspective on things.

Here's the list of gun owner densities per square mile (of land area -- I wasn't the surface are of a state that was liquid):

  1 New Jersey      144.41
  2 Rhode Island    129.01
  3 Maryland        124.21
  4 Connecticut     121.27
  5 Delaware        115.51
  6 Massachusetts   105.97
  7 Pennsylvania     97.59
  8 Ohio             91.33
  9 Florida          84.22
 10 North Carolina   79.54
 11 New York         74.50
 12 Indiana          70.02
 13 Virginia         69.88
 14 Georgia          68.41
 15 Michigan         67.40
 16 Tennessee        67.06
 17 South Carolina   64.08
 18 California       54.58
 19 Kentucky         51.80
 20 Alabama          47.97
 21 Illinois         46.92
 22 Wisconsin        46.23
 23 Louisiana        45.38
 24 New Hampshire    44.31
 25 West Virginia    41.87
 26 Missouri         36.25
 27 Mississippi      34.80
 28 Texas            33.98
 29 Washington       33.15
 30 Arkansas         30.69
 31 Vermont          28.23
 32 Minnesota        27.58
 33 Iowa             23.04
 34 Oklahoma         23.04
 35 Arizona          18.05
 36 Hawaii           17.54
 37 Maine            17.30
 38 Colorado         16.81
 39 Oregon           15.86
 40 Utah             14.88
 41 Kansas           14.50
 42 Idaho            10.33
 43 Nebraska          9.02
 44 Nevada            8.13
 45 South Dakota      6.06
 46 New Mexico        5.76
 47 North Dakota      4.75
 48 Montana           3.87
 49 Wyoming           3.33
 50 Alaska            0.71

(If I could figure out how to attach a file to this, I'd attach the spreadsheet I was working with. Oh, well, if either of you reading this want it, feel free to ask.)