Story 3

Story -3 : Do stricter gun laws reduce firearm gun deaths?

The CDC publishes firearm mortality for each State per 100,000 persons https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/firearm.htm. Each State’ firearm control laws can be categorized as very strict to very lax. The purpose of this Story is to answer the question, ” Do stricter firearm control laws help reduce firearm mortality?”

For this assignment you will need to:

• Access the firearm mortality data from the CDC using an available API (https://open.cdc.gov/apis.html)

• Create a 5 point Likert scale categorizing gun control laws from most lax to strictest and assign each state to the most appropriate Likert bin.

• Determine whether stricter gun control laws result in reduced gun violence deaths

• Present your story using heat maps

Load libraries required for this project

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Loading firearm mortality dataset

Data extracted from the CDC website

Analyze and filter data for this scenario

Filter data to obtain only the necessary columns for this analysis, I’m going to work with the last quarter of last year(2023) for this scenario

Loading gun control laws dataset

Extracted from the law center score card, data scrapped from URL table

Remove columns to keep only the columns need it for the analysis.

Convert values of Grade column into integer.

Merge both Datasets to create visualizations

First heatmap displays the gun control laws strength rating for each state with the mortality rate on it, with 1 as most lax to 5 as most strict.

## `geom_smooth()` using formula = 'y ~ x'

Conclussion.

Do stricter firearm control laws help reduce firearm mortality?

Based on the visualization, the answer is yes, stricter firearms laws reduce firearm mortality, states with most strict firearms laws such as California, New Jersey, and Colorado tends to have a lower gun death rate(per 100k) than other states such as Alabama, Arizona, and Georgia with the most lax gun control laws with higher gun death rate(per 100k)