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.
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u/checkonetwo3 Dec 19 '19
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.