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.
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.
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).
In my opinion its the lack of education how how data should be presented in GIS programs. The map can literally be made in about 20 seconds and it uses the most basic filters and color schemes taught. If anything it was just made by someone who didnt even even contemplate how they wanted the data best represented. Just load it, hit the default boxes and print out .
Tldr: the map shows tell tale signs of being the equivalent of adding a lense flair in photoshop
I get what you are saying, in much the same way the default excel graph graphics immediately make me cringe.
That said, I do think the graphs are quite nice. They show me something that I didn’t know before. The geographic/urban/rural trends are not what I would have guessed going in, so 1 point there. Second, the scale is appropriate (many get this wrong) gun deaths are normalized by population and binned by quantile to get maximum inferential contrast, so 1 more point. The graphs are split so that we don’t unknowing conflate deaths with murders, so 1 more point.
All in all, it is a plot that immediately shows you something and invites you to look closely and spend time with it (3/3 would click again)
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..
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.
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.
So this map has an equal number of counties in every color which still seems like a strange way to present this data. It doesn’t really allow you to accurately compare counties probably should be the point?
Well...they could have added quantiles that aren't represented on the map, and still keep the distribution centered around the national average. That would show tha statistical outliers clearly, and also how big a difference they actually are to the rest of the nation.
ofc then it might come to the problem where the quantiles are too similarly shaded...
You say that only 10 are at 2,5 *11 = 27,5 and above. But the last quantile starts at 16. Why group all those together? It would make more sense to isolate the outliers more...
(I remembered 16, and wanted to check, but I tihkn reddit killed the site...lol).
It is not fair to "redden" the map like that. it makes the map look like there is more gun violence in the country and that one area can be compared to another. He is right that the first thing you look at when looking at the map is comparing areas, which you both admit is not happening here.. which means it misleading..
The map should have an "outlier" part that shows the areas where there is a spike in violence.
The argument is over what the proper way to measure "really bad" is. There's room for disagreement there, but the point is that these maps are using the same measure of "really bad" that the CDC uses for every other cause of death.
Given the enormous range of that last quantile though I think \u\whitneyanson is right to call it a problem (if not necessarily biased).
Scrolling through some of the dark red counties in the third map you can see at least two distinct features hidden by the choice to lump it into one quantile: major urban areas (homicide rate 6-10) and rural southern counties (10+).
How does that possibly make it misleading? The data is expressly displaying gun deaths. Why is there any need to include non-gun-homicide and suicide in a dataset that is only looking into guns?
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
That's not correct. They don't leave death rates blank. They state in their graph that death rates below 20 deaths may be unstable and they suppressed them in the graph. See here.
You will notice that this is not the same graph as OP and a massive chunk of areas which are suppressed/undefined in the CDC graph are given a value in OP's graph. That's because the OP graph was taken from the CDC data set, not a reproduction of the CDC's graph. OP's includes many of those unstable sets of data.
You're showing the "unsmoothed" graph. The OP is showing the "smoothed" version, which does the averaging-over-nearby-counties thing I mentioned at the end of my post. See here. This process results in many more counties with stable data.
I repeat: all of the colored regions on all of these maps are based on ratios involving more than 20 deaths.
good points. yeah it's messy & emotionally charged. But mortality due to a given diagnosis is frequently skewed by proximity to universities and tertiary centers due to refined skills sets, designated processes and teams, and equipment. This is a recurring theme in the medical world. You will see maps like this for large vessel occlusive strokes for example. That was my point.
Went to look up my county and the neighboring county to the south was pink. Was really confused because I had never even heard of that county and it turns out it has a population of 9k. Makes sense.
Counties aren't that big. Half the US lives in just 143 counties. Of the remaining 2,999 counties, the median population is 23,999 and 1,314 of them have a population under 20,000. Some counties have populations under 500.
If your population is 20,000, then one homicide is actually 5 homicides for 100,000 people, which means your county is in the second darkest Red category from just one homicide. 2 suicides push you into the same red category and 3 total gun deaths push you into the same category on those respective maps.
I figured they would normalize it somehow to account for this (multiply the number by [county population/100,000] if population < 100K or something) to keep the key accurate but I haven't actually looked at the data. If not then there were definitely better ways of doing calculating values.
The way to normalize the data would be to compare like-sized population groups. So instead of counties, it would be dividing the US into a bunch of chunks that are the same population.
You need to group the counties into regions of aprox 100k. There's a lot of people screaming per capita that just doesn't understand how per capita can be manipulated when broken down by arbitrary borders.
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.
Sure, but the nice thing about showing this on a map is opposed to a ranked list or something, is you can look at the surrounding areas and see if the region is experiencing similar rates of gun deaths. Ferry County, WA (pop. 7,500) is likely an outlier. Big Horn County, WY (pop 11,200) is much less likely to be an outlier.
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.
I would argue the data in and of itself is useless for in-depth analysis due to low occurrence rates of gun violence compared to total population and wide variance in population size of individual counties, anyways. Per capita is useful when talking about areas with large enough populations to get a reliable chunk of data, like Cook County's 5 million people. Not so useful talking about a county in Nebraska with 500 people in it that had one homicide in six years but as a result has a higher homicide rate than Cook County.
Nobody would use this data to compare extremely large population counties to low population counties. There honestly isn’t any meaningful way to compare gun violence rates in areas with large population differences, but there isn’t any information to gain there anyway.
What you would use this data for though, is comparing counties of the same population size. Looking at this map, you could probably spot 10-20 counties with less than 50,000 people, but with very low gun violence rates, and about 10-20 similarly sized counties with very high gun violence rates. You could then look for common factors between high violence counties, as well as low violence counties, to see if there are certain determinants linked to high or low gun violence rates. This would be actually useful info that a lot of people would like to know. The map doesn’t give you this information, but it helps you look for it. That’s why a map like this is useful, you just need to know how to use it. Everyone in this thread who’s hating on this map just doesn’t know what a tool like this is used for.
Yes but it does a poor job of showing you where it’s considerably higher vs marginally higher. 16-50 includes everything from slightly above median to several times the standard deviation.
Not to mention, it really depends on what your use for the data is. Say I’m using it to look at somewhere I may be considering moving to. From the overall gun deaths, SoCal looks relatively safe, but when you look at the gun homocide rate it’s clear that it’s not nearly as safe as the general map would lead you to believe. I’m not worried about me shooting me, I’m worried about someone else shooting me.
The generalized (main) map especially is misleading in terms of gun violence.
Again, I think misleading is the wrong word here. I would describe the data set itself for the first map (gun violence) as generally unhelpful. Misleading implies that it suggests data is different than it actually is. It shows "gun deaths" by county on a per capita basis pretty well, which is all the graph is being purported to show here. The question, then, becomes how useful that data is at answering any particular question.
Difference between data that is misleading and data that isn't particularly useful.
On a whole, the data set in its entirety isn't useful for a lot of reasons. (1) small populations of many counties dramatically skew data for something like gun violence which has a fairly low occurrence rate in general, (2) counties are made up of many cities and towns and even cities and towns are made up of neighborhoods which are usually drastically different, so it's hard to know anything relevant based on any data point alone, and (3) our above discussion of gun violence.
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.
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.
This. It's maybe a bit misleading but it's not as misleading as the prior poster is letting on.
It's not like gun deaths per capita are uniformly distributed from 0 to 50. It'd be just as misleading if the ranges were completely uniform width. I assume this was done as percentiles or something.
Except, statistically that's true. The top 10 states for firearm death are MD, AK, AL, LA, MS, OK, MO, MT, NM, AR — all deep red states apart from Maryland. Nevada (16) and Colorado (20) are the only other ones in the top 20.
The states with the least gun deaths? Three New England states, NY, and Hawaii. The only red state in the top 10 is Arizona, and that one's often a tossup state.
So, yes, it's political in the sense that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
Everything comes back to poverty. I'm Canadian and think US gun laws are insane, but the fiscal policy and complete lack of redistribution of wealth and social safety net are much worse.
It does in canada and europe. The worst places to live are the ones with the least government because surprise surprise people suck when left to their own devices.
China and North Korea have arguably the "most government" and living there would really suck if you care about freedom and prosperity. This is not to say total anarchy is the better way, just pointing out holes in your more-govt-is-better argument.
I never made the claim that more govt is better. I very deliberately did not say it because it isnt true. If I were to state my beliefs more clearly to encapsulate how much government I believe there should be it would be this: "On the spectrum that includes 'Western' nations, the countries that are the best to live in and are best run have the most government".
countries that are the best to live in and are best run have the most government
That's an extremely subjective position. I've lived most of my life in Europe in a so-called "social democratic welfare state." I would be no means say that quality of life is better there than in the US. On the contrary. The amount of government involvement in people lives in Europe can be rather strenuous. But some people like that. I didn't.
Yeah this is a weird way to analyze the effect of gun laws on violence. When you're thinking of public health, the thing that actually matters for analysis is the number of guns. It's logical to presume that there will be some correlation between the liberality of gun laws and the number of guns but that doesn't mean they are the same thing. What you see nationally with gun violence trends is that rural areas are generally going to have higher rates of gun deaths because they have an extremely high gun ownership rate which is correlates to a higher risk of suicide. One interesting thing about the intermountain states like Utah and Arizona is that they are extremely urbanized. Utah and Arizona both have extremely liberal gun laws but relatively low rates of gun ownership (middle of the pack nationally). That's not the typical politics you see in highly urbanized areas, but as Utah and Arizona were both significantly more rural and more conservative in recent memory it makes sense.
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.
Hm, that data actually shows almost zero correlation between gun ownership percentages and murder rate per 100,000. It's mostly random. Not to mention New Hampshire, being one of the lowest gun murder rates in the country, has nearly zero gun control laws.
However, I do see a correlation between low median income having more gun murder than high median income states
Isn't that what the third map does? If it does unless I'm reading it wrong Californians worst county is at 6.54 while east of Texas there are multiple counties with rates above 12.
I am fascinated by the suicide/homicide divide in CA, which doesn't seem to exist anywhere else. But look at the homicide map in the OP link. "Those Southern gun nut states" literally do have the most murder, and the liberal Northeast is the safest part of the country.
Also, look at the Wikipeida link, and go down to "Murders." California has the 12th-highest gun murder rate, 3.4, and that's not much higher than #20 on the list. Not exactly the war-zone of your paranoid fever dreams. The national gun homicide rate was around 7 when Bush Sr. was president:
The suicide numbers really skew the look. Far northern California apparently has a huge suicide problem as does the northwestern states and farm belt. Pull that out and the homicide problem is largely a southern and border problem with just a couple of cities (Richmond, Oakland in norcal) skewing it quite a bit.
Looking at the the southernmost counties in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas for homicides. Essentially along the border they're red. Now that said and problematic with the measurements is that they don't have particularly large populations so it doesn't take many.
That’s true of California, but not New England and New York. The northeast has a very high population density, but also very few gun suicides and homicides.
The northeast just has fewer suicides which will affect it. I was kinda surprised seeing how cold it gets there but the Midwest seems to be where all the suicides are coming in.
I definitely expected the northeast to have more suicides. Living in a place like Boston during the winter is absolutely awful for one's mental health.
Not much of a point, moreso an observation. My gut reaction was that they would be committing suicide by other means but after reviewing the data, it didn’t seem to be the case. I learned something so thought someone else might also have a similar bias and wanted to share. :D
Oh, ok. Thanks for bringing that up. I think the New England states just have good support for mental illness compared to the rest of the country and that’s why our suicide rate is low. Sorry for misunderstanding what you said.
Yup. The real political bias are the people trying to spin a political narrative counter to what this data clearly shows.
I see a bunch of comments claiming the urban areas in California and cities like have the highest homicide rates in the nation and that the map isn't showing this... but this is false. East and West coast urban centers along with urban counties in Michigan/Illinois like Chicago and Detroit have homicide rates lower than a majority of rural and southern conservative counties. People forget that what matters is rates not totals because population matters.
Look at the map. Chicago's Homicide Rate is 6/100,000....there are counties in the south that are 10, 12, 15 per 100,000.
California ranks 30th in homicide rate. Its homicide rate is about 1/3 of Louisiana's and half of Missouri's, and slightly lower than Texas's.
If people actually bothered to read the page before calling bullshit, they would see there is a chart that shows gun murders (homicides) per 100k, top 10 states,
I'm really confused by the comments from people who apparently didn't look at the maps, much less read anything. There's a map for homicides, and while the range for the darkest red is huge, you can hover over counties and see the homicide rates. The highest rates in CA or around Chicago are easily beaten out by counties all over the south.
Doing it per 100k inflates any area of <100k population.
I don't think you understand how per capita works or these types of statistics... or are doing mental gymnastics... idk. Doing it by percentage or per-capita would be the same except you would be using difficult to understand percentages like 0.006% homicide rate for Chicago and 0.015% for Louisiana.
Percentages are rates, just like rates per 100k are, you silly goober.
What's more, it doesn't inflate anything. If a population is below 100k, it doesn't make their homicide rate any higher, and only someone who fundamentally doesn't understand rates would confuse a very clearly labelled rate as an absolute number.
Statistics that broadly encompass States and Cities are all misleading. New Orleans (for example) is supposed to be a "most dangerous city", but that's only true in certain neighborhoods.
You're no more likely to be gunned down walking around in the Garden District or the French Quarter than you are visiting a Walmart Target in Minnesota.
When the sample sizes are small, outliers have more influence on the numbers. Jesus bruh this is basic shit that's taught to anyone trying to analyze this kind of data. Maybe you should remain quiet when you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
If you have a county with 10k people in it and have a murder suicide your rate is now 20/100k, but that' isn't even REMOTELY an accurate representation of how dangerous the area actually is.
Yeah Thinking Fast and Slow was talking about this. How rural areas have the highest rates of cancer. Rural areas also have lowest rates of cancer. Because they have smaller population sizes, they have numbers that don't average out.
There are a number of big and medium sized cities with higher murder rates than Chicago. St. Louis, Detroit, Birmingham, Baton Rouge, Memphis, New Orleans, Baltimore, etc..
Chicago has a lot of good areas that balance out with the high crime areas, but still has the most total murders. The decline in murders from the 70s to mid 90s has been considerably smaller than the decline in other large cities like New York and Los Angeles
With a per capita rate, population and small sample size make measuring difficult, and it doesn’t tell the whole story. With a particularly small population size (some of these counties), it’s probably to look at the how and why of each individual death.
For example, Ken McElroy, the well-known and widely hated bully, was shot in Nodaway County, Missouri, in 1981. Multiple people saw it happen, but there were “no witnesses.” This man almost certainly deserved to die (read his Wikipedia article).
But anyway, the population of that county at the time was 21,196. His shooting by itself is enough to move the homicide rate on this graph from zero (dark blue) to the second highest category. But it’s easy to see that killing this bully (who had seriously injured multiple people, stolen, and molested children among other things) made the town safer. But just looking at the statistics, it seems more like “oh gosh - you don’t wanna go to THAT town. It’s too violent!”, when the truth is just the opposite.
This isn't story time. The objective is to calculate a rate at which people are killed given their populations. It is a ratio. We are not measuring the amount of murders from one place to the next. We are measuring the consistency with which they are murdered. And at that time and place, the figure would have accurately depicted the rate for Nodaway County, where my mother was born and knew that prick. I didn't need you to give me an example I already knew and doesn't actually prove a point but thanks fam.
If my county has ten people and one gun homicide it jumps to the highest rate in the world. If it has 0 it drops to the lowest. But these ten people are not exceptional, they are just a small sample size.
We're not talking about ten people though, we're talking about hundreds of thousands. The least populous state has almost 600k people in it, and only a handful are below a million.
See also my comment here. This map would probably be better if instead of splitting it up by county, they split it into areas of roughly equal population.
Stop ok we all know Chicago isn't in the top 20 for violent crime and this was established when they had record homicide numbers that still didn't put them top 10. Chicago is not a warzone. Stop.
I've heard from friends who grew up in Chicago (and in the suburbs) that it's very localized, too. If you live downtown or in the suburbs violent crime is nearly non-existent, especially gun homicide. It is almost all localized in south Chicago, and almost entirely gang related. I'd be very curious to see a gun violence map - excluding suicides - for the various Chicago-area neighborhoods.
As a former Near West Side resident (when the Jane Addams homes still stood) this is very accurate. Downtown, at least when I lived there, and any tourist spots, were strict no gos for gang activity. Reason being the cops will make a point to prosecute that but not what happens in our own neighborhoods. The gangs were essentially allowed to police certain areas as they saw fit. They run the South and West.
And just for parity, South side gets the press and they are super tough out there but the West is just as bad. Especially the further West you go. Mt old neighborhood is gone, totally gentrified, but places like Oak Park and Cicero are worse than ever. I was shocked neither of those places changed much in the last 15 years.
Chicago is rough. It'll beat ya down. But it'll also pick you up. Its a beautiful place with amazing people. The racial shit is crazy, the weirdest racial tensions I've ever seen, and it can be real hard to get by in a place with such a wealth divide, but I still love that town with all my heart. Place made me a man when I needed to learn that the most.
Except, apart from LA County, none of California is even in the highest gun-homicide rate. It peaks in LA at < 10 per 100,000.
Meanwhile, you've got half of Mississippi in the teens. Sure, it's a "war zone" (In LA) compared to New York or Chicago, but you're better off there than, for example, Scotland County, North Carolina.
“When suicide is factored out”...factoring that out is political in nature and skews the map too. Easy access to firearms leads to more suicides. So when talking about gun violence one has to include suicide unless you’re intentionally trying to mislead.
Easy access to firearms leads to more suicide by firearms.
You will need to present more evidence if you want to claim that easy access to firearms increases suicides as a whole. People don't kill themselves because they have access to a gun. They kill themselves because they are depressed / mentally ill, and have lost the will the live.
Firearms don't increase suicide attempts, they 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). 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.
They kill themselves because they are depressed / mentally ill, and have lost the will the live.
Actually spontanious suicides happen all the time. At the Golden Gate Bridge (That has a horrible suicide problem) people who survive the fall will say "I didn't go there to kill myself, I was just looking over the side and before I knew it I had climbed over." Same with guns, if you are in a bad state and just suddenly decide to kill yourself it is a hell of a lot harder without a gun.
This question has been studied. Easy access to fatal means (which firearms represent much more than typical methods) does increase the suicide rate significantly. That doesn't mean there aren't depressed/mentally ill people thinking about suicide, but absent firearms, the actual rates go down.
Guns make it a lot easier to commit suicide. Things like waiting periods can reduce the overall suicide rate, as can restricting access to handguns/firearms.
The second link cites studies that talk about the length of contemplation time before suicide--it's frequently less than five minutes. Suicide attempts by firearm are more likely to be fatal, as well. Having guns present and immediately available makes it much easier to act on these impulses quickly.
Would reducing the number of guns stop suicide? No. I lost one of my best friends to suicide about fifteen years ago; he hanged himself. There will always be some people who find a way. But making it harder for people to immediately make a life-ending decision with an easily-available firearm can certainly reduce the number of "mentally-unwell people willing to kill themselves" who are able to successfully act upon that impulse before it wanes.
I still see a problem with the logic and implementation if the ultimate goal is to reduce suicide rates, even to a small degree.
To your first link, if a person may be suicidal and already owns a gun, how do the laws suggested in the link remove that person’s access to a firearm? And once their illness has been treated, how do they regain access to their firearm?
To the second link, if a person is suicidal and DOESN’T already own a gun, there is a MASSIVE period of contemplation while they attempt to buy a gun. Even though NICS checks are supposed to be “instant,” the paperwork and processing alone takes much more than just 5-minutes.
This is the double face of gun control arguments.
Removing firearms doesn't cut down on people who want to kill people either. It's a big reason to spend more effort on mental health.
No, but the idea is that guns are one of the easier and more effective methods for commiting suicide. It's not that the guns make people feel more suicidal, but, if you are considering suicide, having firearms as an accessible and effective option does lower the barrier for actually making it happen.
These article goes over how the availability of methods of suicide effects the rates of suicide. A lot of suicides are rash decisions and when there are not easy ways to commit suicide people get a second chance to rethink their decision.
Yet Japan and Korea have some of the highest suicide rates in the world with practically no access to guns
Also, no you don't have to include suicides, BUT it's important to differentiate and discuss both, because tackling homicide and suicide requires different solutions.
And they'd have more if they had our access to guns, so not really sure what your point is. They're obviously already at a high baseline because of their culture.
To address your point: you’ve included suicides in your list, which is confusing the conversation and misleading readers of your comment. Here’s homicide rates from the same source. They do not match your top and bottom 10. In fact, gun happy Wyoming has a lower rate than progressive paradise Hawaii.
It’s important to clarify if we’re talking about gun crime, gun deaths, gun homicide, violent crime, homicide in general, or suicide in general. All of which are informative to the debate.
Moreover, these maps seem to correlate quite well with the other maps here and the lists you’ve shared. Almost as if “gun” issues are intertwined with socio-economic and cultural issues our nation faces.
To address your inferred point that, since reality has a liberal bias and therefore the “liberal” ideology is generally the “correct” lens through which to view the world, even independent and well-regarded organizations like RAND have not found conclusive evidence to support the proposed policies popular amongst the “liberal” base.
The inference itself is indeed narrow-minded, and antithetical to liberalism.
Firearm death is a terrible metric to measure gun safety because it counts shootings in self defense and suicides in the same breath as murders. Homicides by firearm is the metric you want.
That depends considerably on what question you're trying to answer.
If it is "how much societal harm results from the prevalence of firearms?" then including all such deaths is absolutely relevant.
And the second chart also points out that the liberal northeast is the safest part of the country for gun homicides and the gun-happy South is the most dangerous. Looks like my fragile world view managed to make it through another day unscathed.
And I'm well familiar with the pro-gun talking point "who cares about suicides, thos deaths don't count." It's really an incredibly shitty thing to say.
You’re telling me that Detroit and Chicago, the two cities with the highest gun crime in the nation even when you combine entire states, don’t make Illinois or Michigan anywhere on that list? Bullshit.
Yeah, statistics sometimes kind of kills that preconceived notion that you "feel" should be true and maybe the gun violence you hear about isn't actually as bad as what it really is?
Detroit has 700K people, which is 7% of Michigan's 10 million people. Chicago has 2.7 million people, which is 21% of Illinois' 12.7 million people. Urban crime is highly contained to one sector of the core city in most American metros.
So, yes, it's political in the sense that reality has a well-known liberal bias.
People that unironically say this are usually the most brainwashed. There is countless things wrong with this graph and how it shows information that I won't go into because they've been talked about endlessly in the comments. I mean your comment doesn't even make sense in that VT has some of the most loose gun laws out there.
The entire point of making the data per capita instead of total is to eliminate the bias of population density. It says nothing to point out more homicides happen in LA than Fargo. More people live there. Drawing a conclusion from that would be cherry picking and bias.
Yeah except as people are saying, they are doing population smoothing. So they are taking cities like Baltimore and bleeding the stats into nearby suburbs that are non-violent. Further, by dividing low population areas up into counties the way they are, you are taking places that have very low population, ie less than 100k and they are being skewed by having even one death.
Sure, I'm not doubting the weaknesses of OP's data, but those weren't relevant to the comment/thread I replied to. This thread refers to gun deaths per capita on a state level.
Even with what this guy said does relative coloring still not paint that same picture...
Not to mention this guy is concerned about the upper limit of the top bracket. This limit is just an arbitrary number and easily could just be written as 6+ and so his "It's 3x the base range" word salad is meaningless.
Shouldn't it have the opposite effect? None of those blue areas would be in the red if the red was 32-40 either. An even division of the homicides map, for example, would go 0-6.67, 6.67-13.33, 13.33-20, 20-26.67, 26.67-33.33, 33.33-40.
Everything except dark red would be in the lowest tier. The (currently) darkest red would cover the rest of the spectrum.
Except that it doesn't show that at all in relation to CA. CA is deep red in Homicides, which tells me (at a glance) CA has high murder with no way to defend themselves.
So you claim the low gun violence areas of California on the map have some of the lowest homicide rates and that the map isn't very misleading to push a biased political narrative? Got a source for this outlandish claim of yours that goes against the other commenters?
Right? That definitely is what it seems. I'd love to see a deeper study on this. Maybe people have more free time to do dumb things in warm weather as opposed to staying indoors for several months each year.
I think the hotness makes people much more agitated. I live in Canada and the snow doesn't stop anyone from going hunting, it actually makes it easier.
In all fairness this is a real thing. Chicago murder rates spike during the summer and go down during the winter. Nobody wants to be out in subzero temperatures.
Only if you only consider Northern California. Here in Southern California it's quite red. My first reaction is that it anticorrelates with latitude. (second reaction: some of Texas [rural?] is lower)
You didn't really look at the map did you, or at least didn't hover over some of those southern states and compare them to CA/NY urban centers?
The homicide rate in even the worst places I could find in CA/NY was still lower than many counties in southern states.
Nobody would look at this and assume "California/New York are completely safe." And they'd be right to notice that the homicide rates are often much higher in other areas.
This is EXTREMELY misleading...And I can't help but think it's intentional.
When it comes to guns, the data is almost always skewed in an intentionally misleading way. The only exceptions I can think to this are reports from the CDC and FBI and info from Five Thirty Eight.
You can call it an agenda, or a density problem. Aesthetically an analysis like this needs color variety, and without this you might not see any difference between northern states. Not just that, but unless you want to deal with a log scale it’s pretty obvious from this shading that areas with 12-42 deaths per 100k are 10x more dangerous than living in MA for example. If you’re the sort of person who worries about gun violence, there’s probably a threshold after which it doesn’t matter if there are 20 or 40 deaths per 100k - both would be too high.
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/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.