Firearms-related murders per 100k of population. I’d love to see a similar map of Mexico. Or maybe not. (courtesy guardian.co.uk) Make the jump for the image originally posted with this blog.

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR

34 COMMENTS

  1. It tells me California needs to outlaw open carry. They also need to ban “assault weapons” and register firearms.

    • It tells me that California need to eliminate their stupid bans and waiting periods. In other words become more like Florida were I reside, and maybe that way criminals won’t dare to assault their fellow men cause this time they might actually have bullets on those guns their carrying.

  2. Since this only shows “total firearm murders” and California, Texas and NY have large populations, it looks like you have to click on each state to see the firearms murder rate. It also is problematic that IL decided not to supplement its data. Wonder why?

  3. That image tells me that California, New York and Texas have the largest populations in the US.

    Give me murder rate per 1,000 inhabitants and we have a ball game.

  4. Umm, it tells me where the population centers of the US are. Number of murders is not a useful stat. Murder rate per capita is, though.

  5. That’s a extremely misleading map.

    It should be firearm murders per X number of people. The current map skews the results, putting states with larger population at a disadvantage, and portraying them as more violent.

    Of course, this sets aside the dubious usefulness of singling out firearm-related murders from murders as a whole.

    EDIT: the interactive map allows you to choose between several viewing options.

  6. The per/100K chart tells me that Maryland’s strict gun laws have done little to prevent “gun violence”.

  7. On the Guardian interactive map — try “firearms murders as a percentage of all murders”

    — Now that is an interesting comparison.

    Plus, if you scroll through them — Florida has the lightest impact, in all categories of those states around it — and the most issued CCW permits per capita —

    Nah. That can’t be it … .

    • Gotta read the fine print –

      Notes
      • Florida figures not provided for gun murders
      • Total number of murders for which supplemental homicide data were received
      • Limited supplemental homicide data received from Illinois
      • Rates for robbery and assault are are calculated by the Datablog using US Census Bureau population figures
      SOURCE: FBI

  9. Lies.

    Firearms assaults? Firearm robberies?

    Pretty sure those just show up as either Assault with a deadly weapon(could be a bat for all we know) or Robbery with a deadly weapon, the only state that has a separate law is Florida, which isn’t even on the map…

  10. Maine is nice, and we are armed to the teeth (high firearms ownership rate).

    I know that there are parts of the state where the ownership rate is approaching 90%.

    Go figure.

    It is always interesting to watch different people parse these kind of statistics based on their own bias.

    • Yep.

      I think the most honest reading of most of these statistics is that a societal level, firearms laws are a drop in the bucket compared to poverty, population density, and culture. Criminals will take gun acquisition more seriously than the general public, and even if they don’t, baseball bats are still more effective criminal weapons than they are self defense weapons.

      I kind of want to see these maps with all gang-on-gang kills removed. Sure, they’re something like 2/3s of shootings, but they’re usually very geographically localized, and the solution as a citizen to avoiding the majority of them is “don’t be in a gang.”

  11. i wish the red color on this map of the old line state would get through to elected people in my state capital (Annapolis) that we need to change our CCW policy to “shall issue.”

    • There’s too few elected officials in Annapolis to do that for us. The current government of MD will have to be dragged kicking and screaming by the SCOTUS into “Shall Issue”

  12. I’m no numbers whiz, but I think you’d have to do a correlation between firearms deaths and the poverty level to get any meaningful statistical analysis. It’s fairly easy to cherry pick numbers, taking lies, damned lies and backing them up with statistics. But any way you spin it, I don’t wanna be livin’ in the Peoples Republik of Kalifornia.

    • HEY! I live here and have a CCW. Yes, the politics is too progressive, but there are good pockets to live in. 🙂

  13. I would like to see the breakout by county. For example, I bet Cook County (Chicago) has a lot higher rate the rest of the state.

  14. What would you expect from that paper, in the UK, in a land that was disarmed, where steak knives are not allowed to have sharp points. Remember that journalists are not infallible, most times they don’t have fundamental knowledge of the eccentricities of the subject matter they are writing about, so in the process of twisting facts and swaying opinion they occasionally get it wrong.

    In other words they don’t understand the bullshit enough to know what they are talking about.

  17. I’m no mathmatical wiz, but if you go from Cali with a 2-5 chance per 100k of being murdered with a firearm and then go to Missouri you have a 5-8 per 100k chance of being murdered with a firearm, is it really that big of a difference?

  18. Incendiary? Not really. Nothing earth shattering here. Percentages are always more telling than raw totals. Correlation and causation aren’t the same thing. Let’s not fall into the fallacy trap.

Comments are closed.