American Sentiments Towards Gun Violence

A analysis based on twitter trends.

Introduction

In the US, guns have strong influence on people. Despite the fact, each year, more than 10,000 people in the U.S. are shot and killed by another person, and another 60,000 are treated for non-fatal gunshot injuries caused by assaults (Papachristos 2014). Yet, little has been done to strengthen the gun laws. It was 1996, when a legislation was enacted to prohibit persons convicted of misdemeanor crimes of domestic violence from possessing firearms (Webster and Vernick 2014). Since then, nothing much has been done to curb this menace. But what is the underlying reason or cause for this gun epidemic? How much “gun culture”" is embedded in American Society? German Lopez, a writer and journalist for Vox (a digital media group) who has extensively reported gun violence incidents across the US for years, answers these two questions in two-key related ways: 1st) US has more gun deaths than any other developed nations, and 2nd) it has far higher levels of gun ownership than any other country in the world (Lopez 2018). Let move a step further and ask that how prevalnce of more guns compromises the security of people?

The answer to this question comes from the 2014’s UCR (Uniform Crime Reporting) statistics. One way to understand the problem is to look the spatial map below which simply shows weapons violations rate per 100,000 of the population, across various counties in the US. The majority of southern and western state counties have weapons violation rate above than 40%. This is alarming situiation. In the recent aftermath of “Santa Fe High School shooting”, it becomes really important to understand sentiments of American people towards gun violence. As social media has become one of most debatable forum for the public sentiment, especially twitter, where not just common people, but world learders, celebrities, and academics put forward their opinions. We can utilize this data to see that in this past seven days, how people have reacted towards gun violence and what these words reflect.

Data & Method

The data used in our analysis come from two different sources. First, the sentiment analysis and text analysis is done by mining twitter’data. We used the twitter’s api to handshake between R and twitter directly. Because of limited resource, we will only download 1000 tweets (in english language) from past one week, to analyze the setiments of American people. Along with this, we have also used UCR 2014 crime data downloaded from Social Explorer.

As mentioned earlier, we will acquire 1000 (random) tweets containing the word “shooting” from twitter feed from the past one week. We than use worldcloud package to create a word cloud from these tweets to see the trend. Similarly, using “syuzhet” package, we will use the same twitter data to do the sentiment analysis of those 1000 tweets. The “syuzhet” uses various dictionaries to score entire sentences. Second, we have also used data from UCR 2014 crime statistics. The UCR statitics is uniform crime reporting database which is maintained understand the jurisdiction of FBI. The data is collected from each county of the US which can be used as both state and county level. We simply used this data to spatially map the weapons arrest violations across the US.

The goal of this analysis is to simply, use the data from twitter to analyze the sentiments of social media users towards a national tradegy. We will use ggplot to and sentiment analysis package to score the sentiment from the tweets and in addition to that will also try to see most trending words.

Results

The results show, that in the past one week, the word “shooting”, “school”, “gunman”, and “horric” were among the most used words in the tweets. This shows an clear pattern on twitter which indicates that a major concern regarding gun violence, is regarding mass “shootings”. As it has been said that “a picture worth 1000 words” the picture below speaks for itself. The Santa Fe shooting is not something of a surprise, in past 6 months there numerous shooting incidents, among which “Parkland” school shooting is one most deadly school shootings happened in 2018 which sparked a debate between gun advocates and victims. That is why, “another” is the also among the most occuring words. Unfortunately, we can also see the words “wedding” and “royal” this indicates another trending event which is the marriage of Prince Harry and Megan Markel. One might suspect that in midst of such unfortunate national tradegy, how can such things can trend? Mel Robbins, a journalist writes in her article: “Until gun violence impacts your family directly, you wont care enough to do something about it. There’s a ton of research to explain this apath”(Robbins 2018).

A more comprehensive understanding of the 1000 tweets regarding “shooting” comes from the sentiment analysis. The results show that most of the tweets reflect a negative sentiment among the people (Score=1619). Also, the sentiment analysis rightfully reflect the sense of fear and anger among people as the score for these two words are among the highest (1336) for anger and (1436) for fear. Another important finding is regarding the emotion “sadness”. The score for this emotion is “488” which indicates that people are sad but more often their feelings are more towards resentment and rage. That is why insted of extreme sadness there is extreme anger and negativity among the people. Interestingly, there score for the emotion “surprise” is also very low. This clearly indicates that there is no element of surprise or shock. The mass shootings have been now are more common than islamic terrorist attacks. Overall, the sentiments reflect a very strong negative picture which can be very much related to our earlier wordcloud figure.

Conclusion

Social sentiment analysis is a way of measuring the emotions behind social media trends. It is also a manner in which you can measure the tone of the conversation that is taking place and also benificial to findout if a person is satisfied, happy, angry, or annoyed. It’s not enough to know that something is trending, especially when it comes to social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram (Lake 2018). Our text and sentiment analysis shows that gun violence, especially in form of school shooting has a profoundly negative impact on people. Not only resentment, but from the text analytics procedures it was found that people are more enraged, that is why there is also high usage of profane words and language. But our conclusion does not end here. The most important thing which is revealed by this analysis is that the sentiments of people can fluctuate over the time on different occasions and incidents. However, few research studies have explained the construction of school shootings as a moral panic, with examinations of the roles played by the media, the public, and politicians in using isolated incidents (albeit heinous offenses) to support their interests (Burns and Crawford 1999).

References

Burns, Ronald, and Charles Crawford. 1999. “School Shootings, the Media, and Public Fear: Ingredientsfor a Moral Panic.” Crime, Law and Social Change 32 (2): 147–68. doi:10.1023/A:1008338323953.

Lake, Laura. 2018. “A Look at Social Sentiment and Its Importance in Marketing.” The Balance Small Business. https://www.thebalancesmb.com/what-is-social-sentiment-and-why-is-it-important-3960082.

Lopez, German. 2018. “I’ve Covered Gun Violence for Years. the Solutions Aren’t a Big Mystery.” Vox. February 21. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/21/17028930/gun-violence-us-statistics-charts.

Papachristos, Andrew V. 2014. “Social Networks Help Explain Gun Violence | Yale Institute for Network Science.” https://yins.yale.edu/illustrative-projects/social-networks-help-explain-gun-violence.

Robbins, Mel. 2018. “Why Americans Don’t Do Anything About Mass Shootings.” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2017/11/06/opinions/why-we-dont-give-a-damn-about-mass-shootings-robbins/index.html.

Webster, Daniel W., and Jon S. Vernick. 2014. Updated Evidenceand Policy Developments on Reducing Gun Violence in America. Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press. https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/images/gun_violence/Program%20materials%203.pdf.