Conservative America was shaken this week when Charlie Kirk, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump, was shot and killed during a campus event at Utah Valley University.

The incident recalls a disturbing pattern: Even the champions of “pro-gun” politics are not immune to America’s epidemic of gun violence.

Just last year, Trump narrowly survived an assassination attempt at a Pennsylvania rally. Four decades ago, Ronald Reagan was shot and nearly killed by a would-be assassin. More recently, in 2017, a far-left gunman opened fire on Republican members of Congress at a baseball practice, critically wounding House Majority Whip Steve Scalise. From Gerald Ford, who survived two separate assassination attempts in one month in 1975, to local GOP staffers dying in common gun crime, the list of right-wing political figures hit by gun violence is a long one.

These bloody episodes underscore a grim irony: The very politicians and pundits who promulgate expansive gun rights and tough-on-crime rhetoric have repeatedly found themselves on the receiving end of bullets.

These attacks have grabbed headlines, but there are other conservative victims of gun violence whose stories often go unmentioned — many of them. They are the rank-and-file of the GOP, the voters who put the elected officials in office and follow the likes of Kirk on social media.

It is the residents of conservative America — the so-called “red states” — who are suffering the heaviest toll in daily gun deaths.

Gun Violence Gap

Despite rhetoric painting liberal big cities as lawless war zones, the most dangerous places in America in terms of gun violence are often deep-red states and rural towns.

Federal health data reveal that states with conservative leadership consistently have higher firearm death rates than their blue-state counterparts.

In 2021, eight of the 10 states with the highest gun death rates per capita were won by Trump in the 2020 election. Mississippi — with a staggering 33.9 per 100,000 firearm........

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