Gun Violence in the United States

Gun Violence as a Paramount Public Health Problem

• The American Public Health Association (APHA) states that gun violence “is a leading cause of premature death in the U.S.” More than 38,000 individuals are killed by guns each year, and another 85,000 are injured.
• Already in 2018, the Gun Violence Archive has reported 52,422 gun violence incidents in the United States; 325 of these incidents were mass shootings.
• Since 1996, the Dickey Amendment has acted as a de facto ban on gun violence research by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The United States as a Product of Gun Violence…

Gun violence has drastically shaped our attitudes and our political climate. The pervasive nature of gun violence in contemporary America is evinced by a map that is entirely constructed of gun violence incident points. Hover over map points to get incident information.

Who Should Care About Gun Violence?

Anybody!

• Gun violence requires people, with population dense states experiencing a greater number of gun violence incidents as seen in the map above.
• However, even the least populated states still have notable gun violence concerns.
• The “lethality proportion” is defined as the proportion of those affected by a gun violence incident who are killed in that given gun violence incident; it gets at how deadly a given incident was.
• Wyoming is the least densely populated state in the continental United States, but it hast the highest lethality proportion for gun violence incidents.
• Other states that follow this low population density ~ high lethality proportion paradigm are Idaho, Montana, Alaska, and Nevada.
• A possible reason for this paradigm is that lack of population density leads to a lower density of healthcare infrastucture, which then leads to isolation during emergencies.

The plot below shows the national average for the lethality proportion as a dotted line.