Maybe, maybe not. My point is that image based scale is visually misleading as a state like California which has more people could have more shootings a state like Montana, but by the image scale since there are more people in California compared to the amount of people who have been shot in a shooting, the ratio would effect the size of the icon, hence the average would be lower, and then if a state like Montana which has way less people than California had a higher shooting to population ratio, their rating would go up, even if both are considerably lower than California's.
you're arguing about the graph not the statistics. 0.1 shootings per million people is objectively better than 0.3 shooters per million people, it doesn't matter if the former state has 10 million people and the latter has 1 million. if the latter state adopted the same gun control regulations, then it would have 0.1 shootings a year in the entire state instead of 0.3. isn't that objectively better? the answer is yes.
if you lived in a town that had 10 stabbings per 100 people, and the neighboring town had 1 stabbing per 100 people, it doesn't matter how many hundreds of people are living in these two towns. you have a 10% chance of being stabbed a year, while everyone in the neighboring town has a 1% chance of being stabbed a year. town two could have a million people living in it and therefore have roughly 10,000 stabbings a year, but your chances of being stabbed while living there is still 90% lower than living in town 1
sacrificing public safety for freedom is a tough decision but the fact remains that living people have more freedom than dead people. if restricting gun ownership leads to 40 less deaths a year than before then its objectively beneficial to restrict gun ownership
