The aim of this project is to visualize statistics on U.S. gun ownership and gun-related deaths, between states and - where possible - over time. There is considerable polemic around this subject, and I hope that objective and clear representation of data can help to ground discussion and provide insight.
For context, over 37,000 people died due to firearms in the U.S. in 2016 per JAMA’s investigation of Global Mortality from Firearms, 1990-2016. Compared with all other countries, the U.S. is ranked 20th in the ratio of deaths to population; but when only developed countries are counted, it ranks first. In terms of absolute number of firearm-related deaths outside of combat, the U.S. is second only to Brazil.
In the U.S. the debate over gun violence is often framed in terms of the citizens’ right to bear arms. Some proponents of gun ownership conceive of gun ownership as a civic countermeasure to law-breaking - that armed ‘good guys’ can help to prevent armed ‘bad guys’ from lawlessness. Studies estimate that approximately one third of the US population exercise the right to own firearms, and about four in ten live in a household with a gun. In a global context, with 393 million guns the U.S. represents 46% of all civilian-owned firearms worldwide though only 4% of world population.
While they represent a small proportion of total gun-related deaths, the recent history of mass shooting events - including Columbine (1999), Virgina Tech (2007), Sandy Hook (2012), Orlando (2016), Las Vegas (2017), Stoneman Douglas (2018), Thousand Oaks (2018), and the Pittsburgh synagogue (2018) - has garnered considerable attention and had an impact on American communities’ sense of safety.
There is no single, authoritative source of data on gun ownership, violence, and gun-related deaths in the U.S.
The Dickey Amendment of 1996, lobbied for by the National Rifle Association (NRA), has prevented the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) from using funding for injury prevention to research gun violence and ownership. Congress recently approved separate funding to allow the CDC to collect data on violent gun-related deaths. Additionally, the creation of federal or state registries of gun ownership are explicitly prohibited under the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act of 1986, though there are cases of grandfathered state laws and record-keeping (i.e. Hawaii, New York). The Tiahrt Amendment, reauthorized in 2007, prevents the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms from creating a searchable database of firearms themselves.
The CDC has collected statistics on gun homicides and suicides, and - while incomplete - these are available via the CDC’s Wonder Database. For this project, I downloaded CSV files of monthly statistics by state between the years of 1999 to 2017.
The National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), launched in 1998 and managed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), enables Federal Firearms Licensees to determine if prospective firearm purchasers name and birth year match those of persons not eligible to buy them. Per the FBI, it has been used in more than 230 million checks, 1.3 million of which have led to denials. The FBI releases data on the number of firearm checks by month, state, and type in PDF format, and Buzzfeed News has generously made publicly available scripts to parse this data to CSV. For this project, I downloaded a CSV of monthly firearms background checks by state from Buzzfeed’s Github repository.
As noted on Buzzfeed’s Github repository, this data is noisy and incomplete - many checks are actually for concealed carry permits rather than gun purchases, not all states cooperate in providing consistent statistics, and researchers estimate that up to 40% of firearms purchases make be private transaction which do not need to be logged. Accordingly NCIS statistics are a proxy, and total firearm purchases are likely a multiple thereof.
Due to the general paucity of official data, organizations like the Gun Violence Archive collate information from up to 2,500 sources (local and state police, media, data aggregates, and other sources) to chronicle gun-related violence and crime in the U.S. and publishes aggregate statistics not otherwise easily accesible, like children and teens injured or killed, officer involved shootings, accidental deaths and injuries, and mass shootings. Some of this information may be useful as a supplement to official statistics - for example, geo-location logs of mass shootings.
If I find it pertinent and additive to the analysis, I may source data on state laws, state partisanship, and state party positions as it relates to gun ownership and gun violence.
The aim of the project is to interactively present data on gun violence, ownership, and deaths in geographical context across the United States.