Project Description
With all of the mass shootings in the news, we’re hearing a lot of talk whether gun laws actually help. In this side/beta project, I wanted to investigate if there are any correlations between types of gun laws and their effects on shooting on a state-by-state basis.
The tl;dr conclusions from this project are:
- There does not appear to be a trend between gun laws and mass shootings, but, this was done from a very high level perspective of going state-by-state.
- We should improve granularity to investigate specific counties or metropolitans rather than just massive states.
- We should consider other factors beyond gun laws — such as education, mental health, and income levels.
- Right now these metrics are compared against number of victims or number of shootings (this specific example is number of victims) which isn’t necessarily the best metric.
This preliminary project is linked from this page. The linked to chart uses the following information (which I know, should be listed in the chart but I just created this as an exploratory view to understand where to take this project):
- State colors: Shows the ‘impact’ a given gun law has in each state where Red = Benefits gun rights/ownerships versus Green = Restricts gun rights/ownership.
- Circles on each state: Shows the number of shootings in each state with respect to population where the darker the color indicates more shootings.