In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is responsible for tracking and reporting virtal statistics about the health of US Citizens and Residents. Among the statistics they track are firearms fatalities.

This analysis examines the number and rate of gun deaths by state in the US and looks at the changes in those rates between 2005 and 2015.

These data were originally reported as a part of the report "Deaths: Final Data for 2015" by Murphy, Xu, Kochanek, et.al, in National Vital Statistics Report (66:6), 11/27/2017. It is available at:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr66/nvsr66_06.pdf.

The data for this analysis are publicly available at:

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/firearm_mortality/FIREARMS2015.csv

The data used in this project actually was supplied in two files, one for 2015 and one for 2005. For simplicity these were merged into a singel file for the purposes of this analysis. The data is formatted as follows:

df <- read.csv("FIREARMS.csv")
head(df)

##   STATE X2005.RATE X2005.DEATHS X2015.RATE X2015.DEATHS RATE.INCREASE
## 1    AL       16.0          736       19.6          958          0.23
## 2    AK       17.5          116       23.4          177          0.34
## 3    AZ       16.1          934       13.8          970         -0.14
## 4    AR       15.7          439       16.9          520          0.08
## 5    CA        9.5         3453        7.7         3095         -0.19
## 6    CO       11.6          535       12.6          701          0.09

No additional data cleaning or manipulation was required. The death rates are the number of deaths from firearms per 100,000 population in the state. The rate increase is the percentage increase in the death rate from 2005 to 2015.

The data do not address causes for the death rates, however there are some interesting trends. A simple exploratory look aat the data shows some fairly interesting information about the changes from 2005 to 2015.