By Dan Kois
But as time went by (click here) and the interactive was discussed, questioned, and cited, this provocation also became a kind of experiment. How many deaths were being reported on, and how many were falling through the cracks? Why was it that no single source was collecting this data in real time? In other words, we wanted to know if an interactive like this can actually be valuable as something besides a provocation—whether crowdsourcing can produce real-time data and whether that data is useful and complete. (Hoping people might use our data for their own research purposes, we made it available as a downloadable file.)...
An interesting article from 2012 that noted car deaths are declining at an incredible rate, but, gun deaths are not. Automobile manufacturers seek to make their products exceptionally safe. The US government requires deadly features of cars to be recalled. But, when it comes to guns, their use and public safety there is little to no interest by many elected to government.
Dec 19, 2012 2:23 PM ET
Guns and cars (click here) have long been among the leading causes of non-medical deaths in the U.S. By 2015, firearm fatalities will probably exceed traffic fatalities for the first time, based on data compiled by Bloomberg.
While motor-vehicle deaths dropped 22 percent from 2005 to 2010, gun fatalities are rising again after a low point in 2000, according to the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Shooting deaths in 2015 will probably rise to almost 33,000, and those related to autos will decline to about 32,000, based on the 10-year average trend. ..
In 2011 an article appeared in "The Atlantic" and it stated:
...While the causes of individual acts of mass violence (click here) always differ, our analysis shows fatal gun violence is less likely to occur in richer states with more post-industrial knowledge economies, higher levels of college graduates, and tighter gun laws. Factors like drug use, stress levels, and mental illness are much less significant than might be assumed.
It was a purely statistical analysis of many factors that add up to gun violence in USA communities.
...What about politics? It's hard to quantify political rhetoric, but we can distinguish blue from red states. Taking the voting patterns from the 2008 presidential election, we found a striking pattern: Firearm-related deaths were positively associated with states that voted for McCain (.66) and negatively associated with states that voted for Obama (-.66). Though this association is likely to infuriate many people, the statistics are unmistakable. Partisan affiliations alone cannot explain them; most likely they stem from two broader, underlying factors - the economic and employment makeup of the states and their policies toward guns and gun ownership....
How smart is it for political figures to actually discuss guns as a right so much as a problem?
January 20, 2014, 9:43 p.m.
People who have ready access to a firearm (click here) are almost twice as likely to be killed and three times
likelier to commit suicide than those without a gun available in the
home or from a neighbor or friend, a new study has concluded.
Though men and women with
firearm access were about equally likely to take their own lives with a
gun, the latest research turned up a gender gap when it came to
homicide. Compared with all adults without access to a gun, men with
firearm access were 29% more likely to die in a gun-related homicide.
But the analysis found that a woman who had a gun in or available to her
household was close to three times likelier to die by homicide.
Previous studies have found that three-quarters of women who are killed with a gun die in their home, and that women typically know their assailant. That suggests that women who live in homes with a firearm are more likely to be gunned down in a domestic dispute or by an abusive partner, the research team wrote in their study, published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine. But the group did not venture an explanation for why men with gun access were not much more vulnerable than other adults....
Previous studies have found that three-quarters of women who are killed with a gun die in their home, and that women typically know their assailant. That suggests that women who live in homes with a firearm are more likely to be gunned down in a domestic dispute or by an abusive partner, the research team wrote in their study, published Monday in Annals of Internal Medicine. But the group did not venture an explanation for why men with gun access were not much more vulnerable than other adults....
