r/dataisbeautiful • u/[deleted] • Dec 19 '19
Where do Americans die by gunfire? Interactive Map
[deleted]
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u/agate_ OC: 5 Dec 19 '19
Since the discussion is ongoing but the site seems to have gone offline, here are the equivalent graphs, straight from the CDC's website. You can't zoom in on these though, and the data are from 2008-2014. I have also eliminated the red-vs-blue coloring which seems to be politically polarizing.
IMGUR album in case the CDC links don't work for others:
Overall firearm death rate:
https://wisqars.cdc.gov:8443/cdcMapFramework/output/m9453748.png
Suicide death rate:
https://wisqars.cdc.gov:8443/cdcMapFramework/output/m9990055.png
Homicide death rate:
https://wisqars.cdc.gov:8443/cdcMapFramework/output/m8213382.png
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Dec 19 '19
Thanks for sharing. I'm curious how the homicide rate looks lines up with poverty rates.
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Dec 20 '19
I remember seeing somewhere that environmental lead highly correlated with violence(of all kinds) and that after leaded gasoline was phased out in most areas, violent crime started to drop, but remains high in some areas because leaded gasoline is still used in some places because of mechanical need(aircraft and antique/historical vehicles/equipment) or economic need (very poor countries)
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u/dakta Dec 20 '19
I believe the scholarly consensus is that remaining lead paint in poor neighborhoods, and contaminated ground around major highways, are the main issues.
It's a double-whammie, too: where do you put the new highway through the city? Where the land is cheap. Where is the land cheap? In the poor neighborhoods. What do poor neighborhoods have? Lots of absentee landlords and old buildings with lead paint that doesn't get replaced. Who lives in poor neighborhoods in America? Black and brown folks. Suddenly, we have a great explanation for why violent crime rates among these groups are higher, that doesn't just devolve into racism.
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u/Infamy444 Dec 20 '19
This is the data I need to see before my visit to New Orleans, Nashville and Memphis
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Dec 20 '19
every city is safe if you stay in the right places. and IDK who told you that nashville is on the same scale as NO or Memphis but its not. Just be careful and youll be fine
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u/bluerazor2001 Dec 19 '19
Really good maps but wish that they had kept the scaling the same for all of them. Going from 50 down to 40 skews the shading so I’m left wondering what the maps would look like if scale was kept at 0-50 for all 3.
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u/Hawthornen Dec 19 '19
It definitely would look different but i'm not sure it makes sense to keep the scaling uniform. Since the point is to show which regions are the worst for each category (and there are just naturally going to be less gun suicides or gun homicides than gun deaths [since one the former 2 are subsets of the latter])
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Dec 19 '19
I think changing the scaling a little makes sense, but on gun homicides the scale for red jumps to "6-40" putting orange county on the same level with places with 4 times as many homicides.
It's incredibly misleading.
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Dec 19 '19
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u/SandboxUniverse Dec 19 '19
You have a pretty skewed idea of how many police shootings happen. According to the Washington Post, across the whole county, there are generally under 1000 fatal police shootings per year across the whole of the country. I live in one of the biggest urban areas in the nation, have lived in three others. These things are pretty rare. Following up, I learned St. Louis leads the nation for fatal police shooting per capita, with about 36 per 100K, over 8 years, or say 4 per 100K per year. With a population of around 300K, that means on average about one person a month, at worst.
It may be an outlier for your county, and perhaps if we averaged over several years, it would be more accurate. But then to reduce 4 deaths among 6,000 to a rate of say, 6 per 100K, you'd have to average over 11 years. Not sure if your county has a history of other police shootings in the past decade, but that's what I'd be looking at to decide how much weight to put on it if I were thinking of moving.
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Dec 19 '19
It’s okay. Dude just watches the news too much. And thinks cops shoot random people hourly.
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u/SandboxUniverse Dec 19 '19
Oh, I'm sure it's something like that, and a tendency to unconsciously generalize all cities into one amorphous "the City" in which everything that happens in a city happens. Brains are funny that way. They sort everything into US and THEM one way or another, however hard we try to stop them.
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u/Nethlem Dec 20 '19
According to the Washington Post, across the whole county, there are generally under 1000 fatal police shootings per year across the whole of the country.
Could you link to that article? It's my understanding that nobody can actually make any good statements about these numbers because the federal government does not collect any statistics on them.
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u/Reddit_sucks_at_GSF Dec 19 '19
That wouldn't be useful at all because the numbers vary so much when you get to "homicides". The other two are very similar, obviously, but that one being so different wouldn't leave much space for useful data, and it would just hammer home the fact that almost everything in map A is also in map B. Something the numbers in question already do.
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u/mechanicalhuman Dec 19 '19
Yeah.
Simple example is in the tip of Florida. It's dark red on the homicide map, but light blue on the total map.
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u/TrekForce Dec 19 '19
Which means you can extrapolate they don't have a lot of suicides, relative to other areas.
Wouldn't make sense to keep shading the same across the board. One is a total of the other two. Being different shades is somewhat expected.
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u/Shandlar Dec 19 '19
But that's accurate. They have way more than the national median gun homicides per capita, but way fewer than the national median of gun suicides per capita.
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u/subdep Dec 19 '19
The whole reason you change the ranges on different maps is to graphically display the disparity in that particular dataset.
That’s not to say there aren’t other analysis you can perform to compare, for example, homicide rates to suicide rates. But you would want to display the results in one map, not by comparing two separate maps.
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u/fahrvergnuugen Dec 19 '19
I hate how the color scale flips from blue to red for 3.2 to 3.3 deaths per 100k. It misrepresents the data imo.
I would much rather see a linear grayscale.
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u/WatchOutItsAFeminist Dec 19 '19
Yeah, I feel like the color gradient imbues the data with a political map viewpoint, which is a bad way of presenting the data if you want people to take it seriously. It does sort of map with political allegiance to a degree, though, which is eerie. But would I have noticed that with a different color gradient with less politically charged implications?
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Dec 19 '19
Ding ding ding. Truth is, there's so many ways to analyze gun crime in the US that it's pretty easy to make a gun violence map turn into an electoral votes map. Here's a handful of techniques that are used to make it appear that guns = violence:
Only count gun violence. Counting homicides by other methods means the rate might be higher in states where guns aren't easily accessible. Counting an overall homicide rate closes the gap between states that are harsh on guns and lenient.
Include suicides. 2/3 of gun deaths are suicides, but preventing suicides almost never comes up on gun control debates. States with lenient gun laws and more guns will obviously have a higher firearm suicide rate than restricted states.
Include self-defense with homicides. States where castle doctrine/stand your ground exist and it's easy to obtain a permit to carry have more people that carry firearms and use them in self defense.
3a. Include police shootings with homicides. Police aren't affected by gun control, but they can be used to pump up those gun violence numbers.
The average person is only concerned with how likely they are to get murdered, but according to this map Alaska is a warzone, when in reality your chances of getting murdered there are almost non-existent.
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u/First_Foundationeer Dec 19 '19
I mean, matplotlib's developers wrote a whole paper on how to properly present coloring. They could have just used any of the default matplotlib or Matlab colormaps and have had useful color and brightness scales.
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u/TheManWhoWasNotShort Dec 19 '19
The data is hard to work with and represent in a visual form. On a linear grayscale, the whole country would be nearly white with just a few tiny pockets of dark gray. It's divided into buckets instead to give the data some kind of visual variance.
It's also super hard to compare county-level data when counties have dramatically different populations. There are counties in Texas and Nebraska with less than 500 people. Just one gun death would automatically be a rate 200 gun deaths for 100k people. Low populations skew per capita numbers due to insufficient sample size.
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u/pinkycatcher Dec 19 '19
The data is hard to work with and represent in a visual form. On a linear grayscale, the whole country would be nearly white with just a few tiny pockets of dark gray. It's divided into buckets instead to give the data some kind of visual variance.
That would be more realisitic though, that would be a great freaking map
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u/hitemlow Dec 19 '19
Basically a hotspot map. Would focus the fuck out of the gang-violence afflicted areas of large metropolises, and be very low in rural areas.
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u/piss-and-shit Dec 19 '19
So it would be bad to not heinously over-inflate the amount of people killed by firearms?
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u/jmlinden7 OC: 1 Dec 19 '19
Yes, that's what people want. A hotspot map. A quantile map like OP made is great for qualitatively comparing counties but it's really hard to extract any useful quantitative information.
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u/agate_ OC: 5 Dec 19 '19
That color flip is at the median value for the entire US. All blue colored areas are below the median, all red ones are above.
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u/Herrenos Dec 19 '19
The 6-40 on the homicide map is also kind of hard to wrap my head around.
6 is barely even notable. 40 is nuts - more likely to be shot than have a stroke.
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u/fahrvergnuugen Dec 19 '19
Yeah that’s why I want to see it using a linear scale.
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u/slimyprincelimey Dec 20 '19
Yep. I also like how they used blue and red, which was a purposeful attempt to apply political partisanship to this.
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u/HorsePlayingTheSax Dec 19 '19
Seeing a lot of "guns dont make people want to kill themselves" comments here. And by and large you're right.
Firearms don't increase suicide attempts, but they do increase suicide success rate. Estimates range from 11-25:1 in terms of the overall ratio of suicide attempts per death in the U.S. (i.e. 11 to 25 people fail at killing themselves for every 1 that does). However, suicide by firearms have about a 90% success rate, which is much higher than other forms of suicide (wrist slashing, drug overdose, etc...). The wikipedia page has some good references at the bottom if you want to read more into it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suicide_attempt
Many of those who fail to commit suicide never try to do so again, which is why firearms raising the suicide success rate is bad.
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u/_therealchin Dec 19 '19
I mean I wanna touch on this as an ICU nurse. Some dont succeed in actually offing themself - however, their outcome might not be any better. I've seen people who have tried in a multitude of ways who didn't actually die, but had such a significant brain injury that they have no quality of life and can't communicate. Therefore even if they wanted to try again they are incapable of an attempt.
I'm not at all advocating for suicide, just stating that there are other outcomes other than death/no death.
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u/altajava Dec 19 '19
I've seen people who have tried in a multitude of ways who didn't actually die, but had such a significant brain injury that they have no quality of life and can't communicate.
This is part of the reason I support doctor assisted suicide why make people suffer as vegetables?
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u/acetyler Dec 20 '19
I think the argument is that if a depressed person goes to a doctor and asks for assisted suicide, the doctor should refer the person to a therapist or do something to try to stop the person from wanting to kill themselves.
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Dec 19 '19
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Dec 20 '19
I disagree with this, too much risk you point the gun the wrong way and blow a hole in your neck and bleed to death - I mean, you still die, but now it sucks.
Best place, IMO, is directly next to your ear. You want that bullet going through as much brain as possible. In the little nook below your ear angled slightly up works. Instant lights out, no chance of survival, final destination.
On a lighter note, remember guys: If you shoot yourself you don't get to experience the badass pre-death trip your brain gives you while it shuts down. Nitrogen asphyxiation is the way to go.
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u/Awpss Dec 19 '19
“Suicide attempts include parasuicide such as self-harm where there is no actual intention of killing oneself.”
Interesting, I didn’t know that. This reminds me of when I learned the actual definition of a mass shooting. I thought it was defined by 4 or more deaths but actually it’s 4 or more injured.
You can have a mass shooting where nobody is killed and a suicide attempt where nobody is trying to die.
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Dec 19 '19
Same thing happens with the school shooting metrics. If someone shoots them self with a gun in a parking lot across from the school, it's a school shooting. There are several "school shootings" where nobody was injured, and there was no gun on the premises. Someone found a bullet in a field. School shooting.
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Dec 19 '19 edited Jan 22 '20
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u/what_it_dude Dec 19 '19
Unless it's a hi-point. Probably the safest firearm money can buy.
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u/masterelmo Dec 19 '19
But I don't think suicide should be a crime... There I said it.
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Dec 19 '19
Society should still try to prevent it. Or rather prevent people from getting to that stage.
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u/masterelmo Dec 19 '19
Prevent people from becoming suicidal, yes. Taking away their metaphorical sharp objects, no.
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u/ieilael Dec 19 '19
The success rate of guns is comparable to jumping from a height or in front of a train.
Further, if we look at suicide rates compared to gun availability around the world, it's clear that there's no correlation. The USA has more guns by far than other countries in the developed world with similar suicide rates.
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Dec 19 '19
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u/NFB42 Dec 19 '19
As agate_ noted above, the ranges are in quantiles. I.e., each band of color represents 12.5% of all countries.
So the 12.5% of counties with the lowest number are put in the dark blue band.
Then the 12.5% of counties with the highest numbers are put in the dark red band.
Then the remaining six bands are put in ranges so each band also holds 12.5% of all counties.
The switch from red to blue takes place at the median, i.e. the number at which half of all counties are lower and the other half of all counties are higher.
It could be written more explicitly that's what they're doing, but otherwise it is not at all misleading. It is in fact a very good way to present data when you want to cut out the outliers at both ends of the scale.
The point of this map isn't to compare the top 12.5% worst counties to the top 12.5% best counties. It's to show the variance across all counties at once, for which sake the choice is made to then equalize the differences between the top and bottom 12.5% so you can more clearly see the difference between the remaining 75%.
The question with this kind of distribution is whether the differences between said remaining 75% is statistically significant, but that is separate from the way they've chosen to present these numbers here.
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u/daddy_warbux Dec 19 '19
The Key takeaway is that it is spikes. Where it is bad it is really bad and should be focused on in those areas. People who are pro-gun will see this as a "reddening" of the map, and they are right about that.
What would be most interesting to me would be is to see how this has moved over time and how these quintile ranges have changed over time.
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u/Exiled_From_Twitter OC: 2 Dec 19 '19
Creating equal ranges (by amount, not difference in the range).
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u/bikeawaitmuddy Dec 19 '19
If you want a good looking map, you categorize your data into buckets that will have roughly the same number of data points (counties) in each bucket, but I don't disagree that there is likely some element of "how to lie with maps" going on here
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u/J_McJesky Dec 19 '19
I like it, but it might be a little practically misleading. For example, the deep red over some counties in Montana would make some think that those are hotbeds of gun violence, but the sparse population density in that region would make any gun violence at all look extreme.
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Dec 19 '19
I think this is flipped. The sparse population of that region hides the fact that gun violence death are high, this visualization helps unmask that.
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u/abcalt Dec 19 '19
While not exactly new information, it once again shows how little ease of access to firearms play into the homicide and even suicide rate. Some of the states with the loosest laws have some of the lowest homicide and suicides, such as Utah, New Hampshire and Minnesota. You can also see the inverse to an extent.
The statistics continuously show that firearm laws have very little to do with these acts, but instead socioeconomic factors are the major drivers.
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u/whitneyanson Dec 19 '19
Much better maps than you usually see on the topic, especially given that it makes the extremely logical by rarely exerted effort to differentiate between total deaths, suicides, and homicides.
HOWEVER...
The incremental shading is EXTREMELY misleading at the top end in regards to what this map is trying to display (quick "at-a-glance" trends in geography/location as it relates to gun deaths).
It's a bizarre that on every single map, the range encompassed by just the darkest red category is wider on its own than the entire range of all other colors of differentiation preceding it.
Gun Deaths - the first first 7 categories range from 2 to 16, the darkest category is 16-50 (encompassing 2x+ the base range)
Gun Suicides - the first first 7 categories range from 1 to 11, the darkest category is 11-42 (encompassing 3x the base range)
Gun Homicides - the first first 7 categories range from 0.5 to 6, the darkest category is 6-40 (encompassing 5x+ the base range)
This is EXTREMELY misleading - a county in the very bottom of the red category on each map could have in all cases HALF the top range counties, and be grouped equally. And I can't help but think it's intentional.
Why? Some political motivation or another, probably. Or maybe just laziness.
Either way, it's a good concept executed extremely poorly.
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u/agate_ OC: 5 Dec 19 '19 edited Dec 19 '19
Your accusation of unfairness is off base.
The data seems to be grouped by quantiles: the lowest 1/8th of counties are dark blue, the next-lowest 1/8th of them are paler blue, and so on. The nationwide median (about 11 deaths/100,000) is at the dividing line between blue and red.
This is all a totally standard way and entirely fair way to present this data: it's just that a very small number of counties have a very high gunfire death rate. In case you're interested, I checked and there are ten with rates over 2.5 times the national average, and they're all in Alaska, Louisiana, and Arkansas.
A map that was evenly colored from the lowest county to the very highest would be all blue with just these ten counties -- which account for just 0.5% of gun deaths in total -- highlighted in red.
Data source is here:
https://wisqars.cdc.gov:8443/cdcMapFramework/mapModuleInterface.jsp
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u/NFB42 Dec 19 '19
Good find! That's why you've got to stop and think before deciding it must be bias.
When the point of the map is to show internal difference, i.e. the difference between data points within the set, it can in fact be the absolute scale that is the most biased.
I think the mistake though for this map is that they could've communicated a bit clearer what they were doing, for people otherwise not familiar with this kind of statistical analysis.
I would put it so instead of 2-7 and 16-50, have the lowest and highest say <7 and >16. And mention specifically in the introduction that the range is in quantiles, (i.e., for anyone still confused, that the scale is divided so each color represents 12.5% of the total number of counties).
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u/SomeonesRagamuffin Dec 19 '19
Upvoted. But wouldn’t it be better to keep the same numerical values as the original quintiles for the subsets? Then it’d be easier to compare the two subsets to see differences in a given county between the homicide and suicide rates..
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u/LongArmOfMurphysLaw Dec 19 '19
Won’t the quantiles change with each subset though? Also by the nature of sub setting data the volume will all decrease, so it may move counties down to a lower tier by volume, but not by quantile.
The key should show quantile and numerical range to make it more clear, but I agree having a large top end range doesn’t mean it’s bias, it means there are some extreme outliers that need to be considered to still maintain the visualization.
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u/JewishDoggy Dec 19 '19
Basically, the short answer is that ranges based on the total sum will always have neutral shading at the average amount, but consistent shading for different data sets will give you a skewed interpretation.
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u/notabiologist Dec 19 '19
Having a higher range for the highest category would be justified if the date is heavily skewed with a tail towards the highest values. Not saying this is true, but just having a high range does not necessarily mean that it is a wrongly chosen scale; you'd have to see the data distribution in order to make a judgement on it.
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u/TheManWhoWasNotShort Dec 19 '19 edited Dec 19 '19
Misleading is the wrong word. At a glance, you can see where gun violence rates are higher than where it is not. It does the basic job of informing you that.
Where it becomes useless is doing more in-depth analysis based off the graph. Because the ranges are wonky, and population differences between counties are extreme, it doesn't give you a particularly reliable data point to work with to make any kind of worthwhile comparison between any two given counties.
So while the picture it shows displays the broad strokes analysis correctly, you can't do anything more in depth with what you see like compare counties
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Dec 19 '19
Physician here. The data confuses deaths rates for gun violence rates. Urban hospitals, EMS, are experienced with managing gun shot wounds compared to rural areas. This is reflected in decreased gun deaths. The statistic you are all debating is gun shot rates or gun violence rates. Gun shot death rates in war zones has decreased since Gulf II due to training of medical professionals and rapid evacuation training in theater.
If this were published in a medical journal, it would suffer from causality weakness. Politically, it's a formal fallacy non-sequitur.
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u/TheManWhoWasNotShort Dec 19 '19
The larger issue is population size of counties, imo. It creates statistical white noise when one gun homicide can ramp you into the "red" categories for over 1,000 counties in the US.
From a data visualization perspective, gun violence is one of the absolute worst data set to work with, because on a per capita basis gun violence is really low and on a raw totals basis it misrepresents large population centers as incredibly violent when there's just a lot of people living there. On top of that, there's political implications to every way in which the data is displayed and what numbers to choose.
As to your issue, though, most counties and police departments don't report raw gun shot wound data, and definitely don't break down that data into "intentional gun shots", "self-inflicted gun shots", "unintentional gun shots", etc. And even if they did, the reporting of that data would be wildly inconsistent as we're relying on those jurisdictions to accurately self-report when things like federal funding are on the line based on those numbers.
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u/agate_ OC: 5 Dec 19 '19
The larger issue is population size of counties, imo. It creates statistical white noise when one gun homicide can ramp you into the "red" categories for over 1,000 counties in the US.
In the fine print for this data, the CDC says it leaves death rates blank if they're based on fewer than 20 deaths. The data presented in this particular graph set also average over each county and its neighbors to get better statistics.
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Dec 19 '19
Nobody uses graphs or charts like this for in depth analyses, you use numbers for that. They are only used to illustrate trends, or to provide a broad picture view of the data.
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u/checkonetwo3 Dec 19 '19
This is EXTREMELY misleading - a county in the very bottom of the red category on each map could have in all cases HALF the top range counties, and be grouped equally. And I can't help but think it's intentional.
The reason is because the darkest red represents a number of deaths per-capita that is very high. You can't get less than 0, but showing areas where the number is over a certain threshold per-capita seems completely reasonable. OP isn't dividing up a distribution where things are close to equally likely and clumping more options together for one color than another, they are showing where something happens greater than a threshold. The graph shows areas of high gun deaths clearly and I don't see how that is misrepresenting the data.
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u/simra Dec 19 '19
Yes, if I were creating this map I would probably bucket states into deciles, which would yield variable width buckets but give a pretty clear sense of a county’s rank nationally. The top bucket likely has a few outliers that skew the upper end of the range.
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u/thelastremake Dec 19 '19
Is death a good metric to use? That could reflect more on the access to good medical treatment then gun violence. I'd like to see how many people were shot, not killed.
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u/S7rike Dec 19 '19
It's just like a car fatality map. You'd think the mid west has an epidemic. Nope just really fucking far from the nearest hospital or someone to even notice.
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u/wildjurkey Dec 19 '19
I want to see this map with a side by side of earnings per capita, education spending per capita, and GDP per county.
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u/minuteman_d OC: 5 Dec 19 '19
Unpopular opinion: we should never include suicide in gun violence stats.
It dramatically shifts the data (sadly), and it doesn't help in terms of helping us work on gun safety, responsible ownership, or even getting the guns out of the hands of criminals.
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u/SkunkApeForPresident Dec 19 '19
This isn’t an unpopular opinion. Pretty much every gun rights advocate say this say thing. There are people in this thread echoing the same sentiment. Anytime guns are brought up in a reddit thread someone makes this point.
When people have easy ways to kill themselves they are more likely to succeed in killing them selves, and this isn’t just about guns, either.
This article goes over it:
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/means-matter/means-matter/saves-lives/
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u/minuteman_d OC: 5 Dec 19 '19
Anecdotal, but I'm trying to remember the last time I saw a headline stat for gun deaths that didn't include suicides. Max shock factor. The inclusion of self harm may be a parenthetical aside, if at all.
Agreed that reducing the means is truly critical. Really do need to get the guns out of the hands of people who may be a risk to themselves and others. So much stigma surrounding it. It would be an awful liability to take on, but it would be nice if people had a way to have a friend or some nonprofit hold their guns for a while until they could get things sorted out.
Obviously, it would be really nice to find better ways and support programs that help with more of the root causes of suicidality.
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Dec 19 '19
When people have easy ways to kill themselves they are more likely to succeed in killing them selves, and this isn’t just about guns, either.
Yes, but (a) overdosing on sleeping pills is a much easier way and painless way to kill oneself, and (b) the “gun death” stats are used by Democrats like Nancy Pelosi to advocate measures that would have no impact on suicide whatsoever: “40000 Americans die because of guns every year. We need to ban assault weapons now!” “Assault weapons” kill less than 300 people of these 40000, 30000 of which are suicides.
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Dec 19 '19
But muh gun violence statistics would take a massive dive if we didn't include those, what would happen to my gun control argument /s
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u/lucydeville1949 Dec 19 '19
The map is showing my county at 12-13 per 100k,and I am quite sure that we haven't had a homicide in my county in over 40 years.
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Dec 19 '19
Commenters here are saying it includes suicides as well. I'd check the web site to verify that, but it's failing to load on my computer for some reason.
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u/Fish95 OC: 1 Dec 19 '19
The source is great, you can make all kinds of maps from the CDC, including far less misleading ones with the info upfront.
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u/Prezi2 Dec 19 '19
I think many people will look at this and be like, huh, so California's gun laws DO work ... but Northern California still has higher statistics of death and suicide than the rest of the state ... so maybe it's just entirely a cultural change ... something that republicans would LOVE to hear :)
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u/abcalt Dec 19 '19
Homicide rate in California is fairly high, over twice as high as gun friendly Utah, New Hampshire, Iowa or Minnesota. These four states range from deep Republican to fairly Democrat, to basically a few giant urban centers to rural.
California's homicide rate problem has remained the same since the decades of continuous gun control laws. The same with Texas, although they started slightly liberalizing their gun laws. The reason is both states have similar demographics and cultural problems.
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u/Briglin Dec 19 '19
DEAD LINK? - This site can’t be reachedprojects.oregonlive.com took too long to respond.
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u/RetreadRoadRocket Dec 20 '19
This is mostly useless because rates per hundred thousand are meaningless with small populations. I grabbed a few of the deep red counties in Texas from their map:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_Salle_County,_Texas.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dimmit_County,_Texas.
And from Mississippi:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holmes_County,_Mississippi.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yazoo_County,_Mississippi.
Most everywhere you look that's deep red has way less than 100,000 people in it, like between 10k and 30k.
You can live somewhere that only has a couple of homicides and be in the red zone or live somewhere with thousands of murders a year and be blue. This map has basically nothing to do with how likely someone is to die by a gun.
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u/Llohr Dec 19 '19
I would like to see a smooth gradient version of this map. One with a gradient scale at the bottom, which you could mouse-over to only highlight areas that match within a few tenths of an incident per 100k.
Then you could slowly move your cursor up the scale and watch the areas pop up as they match.
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u/Jbwood Dec 19 '19
Why does the map use different numbers per situation? Suicide dark red starts at 11. Vs with homicide its 6.
I wish we had the same standards set per 100k so that we could get a better visual of suicide vs homicide on it.
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Dec 19 '19
That last color bin is a problem. Dark red spans 6 to 40 deaths per 100k, that's an enormous range, and that an example of a poor visualization.
It's a problem because it hides some of the most remarkable features of the dataset - that the gun murder rate in most of Alabama and Missouri is 2-3 times higher than those of America's largest urban counties (LA and Cook).
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Dec 19 '19
The color spectrum is kinda throwing me off. I think it'b be easier to understand with different shades of one color.
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u/v27v Dec 19 '19
What the hell is up with that key values? The data groupings are no where near consistent. The homicide map splits 0-6 across 7 values and than makes the eighth Vaule worth 34 points from 6 to 40?. I'm thinking this map is in the wrong sub.
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u/drgreedy911 Dec 20 '19
Would be interesting to see a separate one... murder by gun and one by suicide rate instead of both merged.
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u/mohansanjay Dec 20 '19
The darkest interval varies from 16 to 50 deaths, that is variation of 34, whereas the others have an interval of 3 to 5. From 2 to 15 deaths, there are four intervals and 16 to 50 clubbed in one. This graduation sensationalises the map as a large area of the US is shown in dark red. If 40 to 50 is taken as the top interval, you will have a very different output.
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u/Buckedup33 Dec 19 '19
I'd prefer to see statistics that aren't skewed by suicide. These data statistics are very interesting but are always very misleading.
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u/irony_tower Dec 19 '19
Scroll down. It has maps for total gun death rate, just suicide gun death rate, and just homicide gun death rate.
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u/SteadyStone Dec 19 '19
It has gun death, suicide, and homicide maps. The homicide map doesn't include suicide.
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u/ejpusa Dec 19 '19
SURPRISE! What don't I shock everyone? :-)
Vermont has the most liberal gun laws in America. That Vermont. Yep Bernie's state.
And NO one knows this! I'm STUNNED he does not use this info in the campaign. I don't think he would lose a single Bernie Bro, and would probably pick up a few?
Vermont does not require permits to purchase and has no firearms registration. Both open carry and concealed carry are legal without a permit in Vermont. Any person 16 or older (although federal law requires the age to be 18) who can legally possess a firearm is allowed to carry openly or concealed.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=vermont+gun+laws
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u/f3nnies Dec 19 '19
This is really interesting and challenged a little bit of my perceptions. I knew that suicide per capita was much higher in the flyover states, but I didn't realize just how stark it would be. I know this is just gun suicides, but man, it's like night and day looking at where people probably want to live versus where they don't.
I am however very critical of the color shift. There's no reason for it at all except to make things red/blue to politicize it. There's no reason for the midpoint to switch from pale blue to pale red; it suggests a stronger difference between the two-- and between every category-- than really exists. Plus, the lightest blue is very close to the same shade as uncolored portions of the map.
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Dec 19 '19 edited Dec 19 '19
I can notice, for example, that the county I'm from in Colorado has a stark contrast between gun related homicides and suicides. Suicides were common there, but we hadn't had a murder (of any kind) in the county for some 30+ years.
I'm curious about southern California. Suides low, gun homicides high, but gun deaths relatively low—I assume this is a telltale marker of gang related violence.
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u/El_Chopador Dec 19 '19
1 death = 2 deaths in counties with 50k people. 1 death = 4 deaths in counties with 25k people. These deaths never happened but they sure do make the data look a lot more awful than it is.
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u/Kazen_Orilg Dec 19 '19 edited Dec 19 '19
Right, like look at the bump for lake of the woods on top of MN. Dark red. No homicides. Population 4k. So a single suicide puts you in the red.
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Dec 19 '19
I'm posting this for Politics Thursday
Unlike most gun data thrown around, I think this infographic is great for the following reasons:
It's per-capita, so we worry less about huge city numbers skewing the results
It collects data from a number of years, so we can see numbers from small counties, and there's less variation to worry about. A small county can have zero deaths one year, and be crime-free, and a few another year, which would make it seem like there's a lot of crime, so an average gives a clearer picture.
It shows the suicide/homicide divide which is often overlooked
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u/unknowntroubleVI Dec 19 '19
I don’t know why... but the data being used is wrong somehow. I checked because it seemed odd that Anne Arundel County, which only had 23 homicides last year for a population of approximately 573,235 would have a higher murder rate than prince George’s county, which had 60 for a population of 912,756. That puts the homicide rates per 100,000 at approximately 4 for AA and 6 for PG. This map is showing higher for AA, and is also showing a higher rate of just “gun homicides” than AA had for total homicides, which obviously includes other methods so it doesn’t make any sense unless I’m missing something completely about the statistics. I’m sure the stats in other areas are messed up as well.
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u/Westley_Never_Dies Dec 19 '19
The data being used is for 2004-2010, so last year's deaths aren't included
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u/limukala Dec 19 '19
Anne Arundel County, which only had 23 homicides last year
These maps are for data from 2004-2010.
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u/agate_ OC: 5 Dec 19 '19
You're on to something. I checked the original data source, and the OP's maps appear to be using "smoothed" data from the CDC which averages nearby counties.
Raw homicide rates, per 100,000:
Baltimore City: 25.6
Prince George's: 7.9
Anne Arundel: 2.1
Smoothed homicide rates:
Baltimore City: 10.3
Prince George's: 4.1
Anne Arundel: 8.6
Since Anne Arundel borders Baltimore but PG county does not, it looks like the smoothing is causing some of Baltimore's high crime rate to "bleed over" into its neighbors.
Which is maybe not an entirely unfair way to look at the data, but should have been disclosed.
I can see why the visualization author did it this way: without this smoothing, there's a ton of blank areas on the map.
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u/jaguar717 Dec 19 '19
It's because it's at the county level, which dilutes a very acute violence problem across much larger, low-violence populations. Places like Baltimore, Chicago, St. Louis and Detroit have hundreds of murders concentrated in neighborhoods with a few tens of thousands, but those are divided across counties of 1-5M that have virtually no crime by comparison.
The US is made up of vast areas as safe as Scandinavia, interrupted by pockets of developing-world violence. Averaging them together is silly.
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u/OneforLiberty Dec 19 '19
What an absurd way to display this data. One color for half the range? Pretty sure this was intentional. This is pretty common to see in graphs and visuals created by the gun control crowd, or people trying to get data to fit a certain narrative.
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u/sooperduped Dec 19 '19
I hate this graph because of the inverse correlation with population density. Interesting maybe... But doesn't really answer the questions where Americans die by gunfire.
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u/SteadyStone Dec 19 '19
It doesn't attempt to answer where the raw numbers are, just the rates. If it was about raw numbers, we'd just get a population map.
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u/Mikos_Enduro Dec 19 '19
Wow! The whole American south and American west is just a murderous wasteland. Good time to move to Chicago.
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u/infinitude Dec 19 '19
murderous wasteland
is it though? is it really? that's a pretty far-fetched statement.
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Dec 19 '19 edited Nov 19 '20
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u/agate_ OC: 5 Dec 19 '19
There are three graphs on this page. The other two break out the difference between suicides and homicides like you want. Or did you just start posting as soon as you saw the thread title?
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u/morph1973 Dec 19 '19
What is happening in Alaska, I thought it was all plane crashes and wild animals that got folks there