PROJECT 4: GUN VIOLENCE
The article “Here’s How Gun Control Works in Canada” discusses the differences in gun laws between the United States and Canada—namely, how Canada’s gun laws are much stricter. The article breaks down where these disparities lie, into the differences between components such as types of guns, licenses, registration, concealed carry, and safety requirements. I found the differences in background checks discouraging. Specifically, while Canada requires the passing of a background check for all gun licenses, the U.S. has many holes in the process for the background checks of federally licensed gun dealers (Matthews, 2014). Much like in class, where we discussed how concealed carry laws vary amongst states, they vary amongst countries as well-- the U.S. and Canada being the two countries discussed.
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This project analyzes gun incidents, which is the sum of the number of individuals killed and the number of individuals injured. The numbers are not adjusted for population disparities amongst the states and cities. Therefore, this is important to consider when analyzing the first and second visualizations. The data present the years 2013-2018. All data is taken from “Gun Violence Data,” which draws upon information from the Gun Violence Archive (Ko, 2018).
The first visualization demonstrates the number of gun incidents across the United States. The shading is presented on a spectrum, with the darkest shaded states having the highest levels of gun violence. As presented in the data, Illinois has the largest number of gun incidents. Other large states, such as California and Texas, are also shown to have a large number of gun incidents. States like Wyoming and Vermont, on the other hand, have the least amount of crime, for their small populations play a role as well. Specifically, my state, Maryland, has 4,858 incidents which is relatively high when compared to states of a similar size (Ko, 2018).
The second visualization shows gun incidents in Maryland as broken down by city. Specifically, the cities shown are the 10 cities with the highest number of gun incidents from 2013-2018. The data demonstrates that Baltimore has the highest amount of violence by far, with 3,482 incidents (Ko, 2018). Interestingly, there are also six cities included in the top 10 highest number of gun incidents that are not among the top 10 most populated cities in Maryland. Those, in my visualization, are denoted with an asterisk. In this visualization, Baltimore is the large outlier, as it contains a very significantly higher number of gun incidents than all other cities combined (“Population of Cities in Maryland, 2019).
Finally, my third visualization denotes gun incidents by day and by month in Maryland, also over the period 2013-2018. Much like the map above, squares in which there were more incidents are shaded darker, with Wednesdays in July being the point of the most incidents (Ko, 2018). Overall, I found it rather difficult to discern a pattern from the data that is presented here, with the exception that the least number of incidents seemed to appear on Thursdays.
The outcomes are similar to those presented in class. Specifically, we have also discussed open versus concealed carry states. As presented in a visual in class, Maryland is one of the few states that has No Issue Laws. This is directly contrary to most states, however, which have Shall Issue laws. There is also empirical support for both open carry and concealed carry, thus, the data is inconclusive (Lesson 5 Handouts).
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Bibliography
Ko, James. "Gun Violence Data." Kaggle. Last modified 2018. https://www.kaggle.com/jameslko/gun-violence-data.
Matthews, Dylan. "Here's How Gun Control Works in Canada." Vox. Last modified October 24, 2014. https://www.vox.com/2014/10/24/7047547/canada-gun-law-us-comparison.
"Population of Cities in Maryland (2019)." World Population Review. Last modified 2019. http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/maryland-population/cities/.
