Motivation

Gun violence has been of increasing concern across the United States over the past decade. Our objective was to develop an online resource to explore general trends in gun violence and identify any important variables associated with gun violence incidence. The target audience for this webpage includes the general public, gun control activists, and legislators. The goal of this resource is to raise awareness on the widespread impact of gun violence, and inform future public health interventions and policy changes.


Methods

Data from six sources were considered for this project. The data sources, scraping methods and cleaning procedures for each dataset are described below.

  • The Github repository for this project can be found here.

  • The final website can be found here, and corresponding Github repository for the website is located here.

  • The final report is housed in a repository here.


Data

Gun violence incident data can be accessed here and is from the Gun Violence Archive, an “online archive of gun violence incidents collected from over 2,500 media, law enforcement, government and commercial sources daily in an effort to provide near-real time data about the results of gun violence. GVA in an independent data collection and research group with no affiliation with any advocacy organization.”

Firearm mortality data was obtained from the CDC Wonder data query. Relevant parameters were selected to create our own dataset with only relevant variables.

Gun law scores of states is created by the Giffords Law Center using “a comprehensive grading rubric that assigns positive point values to gun safety policies, such as private-sale background checks and extreme risk protection orders, and negative point values to dangerous laws, such as permitless concealed carry”.

Data on gun license applications was taken from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which is used by Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) to instantly determine whether a prospective buyer is eligible to buy firearms or explosives. This data is used to approximate how many people tried to apply for gun licenses in each state.

Data on the number of federal firearms licensees in the U.S. was downloaded from Statista. This source pulls data from the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), and is used to approximate how many people actually got approved for gun licenses in each state.

State total population data was also taken from Statista. It was used to standardize the number of approved licenses and applications in different states.

Unemployment data come from FRED economic research. Each dataset describe percentage of unemployment in each state, not seasonally adjusted.

Chronic disease related data extract from data.gov. Chronic disease related information, such as rate of heavy drinking, mental healthness, poverty, etc, in each state each year.


Screencast

This screencast illustrates our project, emphasizing our motivation, data analysis, and results.