Gun Homicides in America - Visualized

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Jerome Cukier does the heavy lifting so that you don't have to.  On to details...
As Jerome puts it
I have created this map of every homicide in the USA using firearms for the latest year where detailed information was available. Every, that is from all the agencies that report homicides to the FBI, which is not an obligation – this is why the map lacks Florida data.

In the interactive version you can see how murders happen through the year and explore them according to several criteria that were available in the database. While large shooting sprees receive media attention, unfortunately there are thousands of cases each year in just about every community.
Note that the above is just an image - go here for the actual - interactive - visualization.

Incidentally, the visualization is a pretty horrific companion piece to this chart from the WP showing gun-related murders in the developed world.  We are - sadly and horrifically - No. 1 by a wide margin. Yay for the 2nd amendment :-(
 

Comments

Anonymous said…
Why not compare ALL murders, not just gun-related. It's just misleading this way. Take eg. Austria and Switzerland, quite similar in many aspects, expect guns: it Switzerland essentially there's a gun in every household, in Austria there are much less. Gun related murders are obviously more in CH, but overall murder rate is quite similar. It's not that when a prospective murderer doesn't have a gun handy, they give up on their deed, they just choose different tool, like a knife or poison.

In fact, there's hardly any evidence that the availability of guns affects the murder rate in any significant way. Certainly it's orders of magnitude more affected by poverty, social inequality and the like.
December 30, 2012 at 3:30 PM
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