I’m not entirely sure what Abbott was talking about when he claimed that California has more gun deaths (recent mass shootings? total deaths?) but perhaps he doesn’t realize that California has a much bigger population than Texas. The statistical difference in gun deaths between California and Texas is quite large. California’s death rate per capita is 9 per 100,000. Texas’ is 15.6. California has the 8th lowest rate of gun deaths in the country. Texas has the 25th. As for he general point that both blue states and red states have gun violence, it’s absolutely true. But it’s the red states that really get the bang for the buck: A new study published in Journal of the American Medical Association’s Surgery found that firearm deaths are more likely in small rural towns than in major urban cities, adding to research that contradicts common belief that Democratic blue areas have higher incidences of gun-related deaths than do Republican red districts. Researchers from Children’s Hospital Philadelphia, Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the University of California examined two decades of mortality rates and cause-of-death data from the National Center for Health Statistics’ National Vital Statistics System to compile the study. A Third Way report found that between 2000 and 2020, Trump-voting states had 12% higher murder rates than did Biden-voting cities. Data shows that in 2020, eight of the ten states with the highest murder rates voted for the Republican presidential nominee in every election in this century. In the past, Republicans have made crime a major campaign…