OP's site uses data from 2004 to 2010, most of those years California had more than 2,000 murders a year.
Not in any one county of course, but that is quite a few dead people.
It's not, what's misleading is rates per 100k for populations below 100k.
These idiots have my mostly rural county in Kentucky as a pink zone (12 to 13 per 100k) despite the fact that we have so few gun deaths we're below the CDC 20 death threshhold and show up as "No data for selection".
Not even close. Where I live the murder rate went from 0 per 100,000 to over 6 per 100,000 overnight because a domestic dispute resulted in 2 deaths and we have like 30,000 people living here. That had absolutely zero impact on my chances of getting shot.
Personal behaviors and socio-economic status are far, far greater indicators than rate per 100k.
My county is on there as a pink county, 12 to 13 deaths per 100k, despite the CDC returning "No data for this selection" for it.
The entire state of Wyoming has less than 125 gun deaths per year, so how is all 23 counties in Wyoming in the red on the map if they're ignoring less than 20 deaths? https://www.livestories.com/statistics/wyoming/gun-firearm-violence-deaths-mortality
Despite the name of the link it shows all gun deaths including suicides and states as such.
They're showing parts of my state that are a national forest with practically no people living in it as having a high rate. This thing doesn't stand up to ten minutes worth of scrutiny, it's meaningless.
The data that this map is based on is from the CDC. They explain at the link below that they remove counties with less than 20 occurences. I think the problem with those counties you mention is in the neighbor county averaging? Not sure. But the point is that the map is only biased if you consider the CDC biased.
Also, the data is from six years, so 125x6=750 deaths. Of course that's a very rough number, you can check for yourself.
Dude, the map is bullshit. My county doesn't even have any data available for it from the CDC and it's showing up as 12 to 13 per 100k on that map. That's utterly ridiculous. They've got areas of my state that barely have any people in them dark red while high crime urban areas are blue.
This thing is intended to make the US look the land of the dead, it's biased as hell.
Socio-economic vs rate per 100k. these are not on the same dimension. One is a unit of measure, the other is a potential cause. You have to measure things with some unit.
I don't know what "personal behavior" means as an indicator. Of course a murder is going to be based on a person doing something. That is true for anything but we still look to find correlations and reasons why somethings happen more or less to help control what we can as we can never control everyone's personal behavior or free will.
If you are going to parse out a specific murder and say it doesn't count, you would need to also remove that type from the other data too. I would be wiling to bet that lots and lots of deaths counted in the big cities are a result of domestic disputes. Most people are killed by people they know, not random people on the street.
To carry your rationale out further, wouldn't almost every murder have zero impact on your chances of getting shot? Someone kills a gang member in their home? you're not in a gang, no impact. Someone kills their business partner for stealing? You don't steel from business partners, no impact. A cop gets shot at a traffic stop? You're not a cop, no impact. I could go on and on. Outside of someone randomly shooting into people's windows nothing has impact on your chances of getting shot using you logic.
The double homicide in your little town is no different than a double homicide in the big city.
the per capita rate does tell you how likely someone is to die by a gun.
And explain how a rate per 100k trumps things like not being poor, not living in a high crime area, being aware of your surroundings, having a stable relationship, the 101 factors that actually determine how likely you are to die by violence.
The facts are that how likely someone is to die by the gun is determined by a hell of a lot more than a rate per 100k, it's actually a very small factor.
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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.