Weak gun laws.

Wow. Slanted journalism, anyone? I took a look at the link provided in the article, and found a map displaying which states got which ranks. Although neither the story nor the press release gave the national average, or each state’s ranking in any order, in about 5 minutes, I was able to click through each state and record the ranking (maybe journalists should think about doing things like this). 5 more minutes of Excel gave me this info:

Alabama received a rank of 16. The mean of the states’ rankings (national average) was 17.02. Considering outliers such as California, a more appropriate measure of central tendency would be the median, which is 9.5 (6.5 points below alabama, or 2/3 of alabama’s score). The mode of the data is 4, 12 points below alabama’s rank, or the square root of alabama’s score. There were 33 scores below Alabama’s and 16 scores higher than Alabama’s. The low score is a 0 (Utah), and 6 states scored a 2. Looking at this data, I wouldn’t say Alabama is “ranked low.” With results skewed this badly toward failure, a low ranking is meaningless, and the data needs to be re-analyzed, along with a study on the obvious bias of the scoring system. But I guess that PACs sending out press releases containing purposely misapplied data and irresponsible statistics isn't as sexy of a story as "Gun Laws in AL Considered Weak."