Gun Deaths in America (Data Visualization) | Hacker News Reader

Gun Deaths in America (Data Visualization)

fivethirtyeight.com

40 pointsjohnny31339 comments

    Suicide: 22,000    
    Gang warfare: 6,000    
    Other homicides and accidents: 5,000

Yes, the answers (or lack thereof) depend on the cause. The common sense gun control for which our late night comedians are pleaing will be very different depending on the type of violence. It would be refreshing for all of the ideas being pitched by gun control advocates were ranked by feasibility, effectiveness per cause of death, and legality.

I wish the "explore for yourself" section included numbers and filters for the data explored in the "slides", such as police involved fatalities and mass shootings.

Where do you get the "gang warfare" breakout number from?

I'm guessing they're ASS-uming all black deaths are gang warfare...

Let me be clear that all deaths are significant and we should work to reduce them where possible, and with minimal reduction in the liberty of all.

I do believe that most of the deaths cited in that "young black men" metric are somehow related to drug trade and gang violence. Let's zip on up to Chicago for some reinforcement of that. Also - not all death in that category is "gang member gets what they deserve" - I'm not saying that. I'm ASSuming it's related, though.

There's also another dimension to this - reports tend to focus on gun related _death_ but ignores injuries where the victim survived.

This chart - http://assets.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/gun_gray.jpg - from http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/04/true-cost-of-gun... suggests the total number of gun related injuries + deaths in 2012 was ~120,000

I'd submit that reducing gun death suicides is not an unworthy cause. Not everyone who would commit suicide with a gun will proceed with a different method. Guns can offer a fast and easy solution to suicide that a person without that access may need to sleep on, and eventually choose to reach out and find help instead.

Not really, there's plenty of things easier than buying a gun. Rope, non-prescription drugs, bridges, etc.

If you look at suicide rates world wide USA is one of the lower rates. Even those countries with MUCH stricter gun laws have more suicides.

Well the common thread in all of the statistics are guns.

It would be interesting to see this as per-capita statistics, then compared to OECD countries.

Not quite the same data, and a few years out of date, but a really striking graph: http://crookedtimber.org/2012/07/20/america-is-a-violent-cou...

(those figures are "death from assault", which covers more sorts of violence but excludes suicides. The OP article includes suicides.)

Agreed. Although to draw conclusions from high-level stats like this it's necessary to drill down into the data. For example, I'd be curious if you could isolate the 'ghettos' in all the US/Canadian/European cities and allow you to toggle them within the stats to compare all the countries.

People tend to talk about the unique US obsession with firearms - which is true, but the core problem is gun violence, and the amount of violence happening in the US ghettos is also highly unique among western countries. And I wouldn't be surprised if it accounted for a significant percentage of 'mass shootings' (not just the type in Vegas but as the FBI defines them with >=4 victims).

Generalizing about the US gun problem as a singular 'gun problem' doesn't do them any favours. These problems won't ever be effectively confronted as a generic problem if it's multiple groups of with different cultures, incentives, circumstances, etc. People in the US have been obsessing for decades over a politically (and practically) dead options such as national gun control laws or more harsh gun sentencing as the only solutions - while missing opportunities to confront this as the nuanced individual community or cultural problem it is. Much like the drug war, there's no panacea solution in law enforcement.

Mass shootings in particular are mostly a white phenomenon: https://www.statista.com/statistics/476456/mass-shootings-in...

That graph only adds up to 90 shootings. There are far more mass shootings than that, especially over such a large timespan. What is the source of that data?

But I wouldn't be surprised if they are still #1, as they are 78% of the population.

Edit: the source was Mother Jones, which only lists 92 mass shootings: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-m...

The FBI listed 1,518 mass shootings in 2012...

I believe the first step to fixing a problem is to identify and admit there is a problem. Namely, there are a LOT more gun deaths in the US per capita than other countries that it is supposed to be a peer of (OECD countries)

> but the extreme violence happening in the US ghettos is also highly unique among western countries.

It sounds like you are suggesting you would like to exclude the US ghettos from the data... does that mean you would exclude them from the problem? would you say then there is no need to fix the problem there?

I am really not following your reasoning. The US has a major, major problem that needs to be fixed.

> does that mean you would exclude them from the problem? would you say then there is no need to fix the problem there?

Where did I say anything close to that? I merely said the problems need to be analyzed and confronted on a culture-by-culture basis, not treated as a singular 'US gun problem'.

The US is a big, highly varied country and those gun deaths have varied causes and root problems.

> there are a LOT more gun deaths in the US per capita

Averaging out via per capita across the country is a useless statistic, in terms of actually confronting the issue, if there are massively disproportionate events in certain areas or sub-demographics with different incentives, causes, etc.

Legal gun control is not the only way to solve this problem. Especially given the US's unique legal history with firearms, current ownership rates, and the fact they are the world's biggest manufacturer and exporter of firearms.

Even if they did a total ban on legal firearm sales to civilians there's still billions of guns in the country... there has to be more than that. And yet I see plenty of people perfectly satisfied with their politically-dead panacea solution.

> The US is a big, highly varied country

I hear this excuse over and over and over.

Do you somehow think the US is unique in this situation?

Do you think Australia is homogeneous? (way, way more per-capita immigration)

Do you think if you remove those "ghettos" from the US stats AND the stats of other first world countries you will suddenly see the US leap ahead?

> Do you think Australia is homogeneous? (way, way more per-capita immigration)

There have been plenty of studies that show immigration to poor US neighbourhoods reduces violence [1]. I don't fully understand what you're suggesting here?

I'm from Toronto, we have tons of legal immigrants and while some carry violence over from their countries (gun violence is a big problem in Somali [2] and Jamaican enclaves here) but otherwise it's extremely safe, likely thanks to immigrants not in spite of them.

The article I linked even suggests the best solution they found in Minnesota and Toronto for reducing gun violence was hiring Somalis to go into Somali neighbourhoods to increase inter-community reporting and educate kids - which supports what I said about approaching this on a cultural basis. Not as a general 'gun problem'.

> Do you think if you remove those "ghettos" from the US stats AND the stats of other first world countries you will suddenly see the US leap ahead?

I can't tell if you're trolling or not... I tried to answer your other highly suggestive questions already but I don't think I could take any more of these seriously.

[1] https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Immigration_and_crime

[2] https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/why-so-many-s...

> I believe the first step to fixing a problem is to identify and admit there is a problem. Namely, there are a LOT more gun deaths in the US per capita than other countries that it is supposed to be a peer of (OECD countries)

Using gross per capita measurements to justify federal policy affecting people's rights is bad strategy. Homicide is the problem, and it is concentrated among major subsets of some ethnic groups, and around certain forms of crime. If you look only at whites and asians, you see a similar picture to western Europe.

The homicide problem in the United States is largely culturally isolated. When the response to these culturally isolated problems is further restrictions on rights (particularly of a kind that has been shown to be ineffective) rather than community outreach, social and mental health programmes, and controlled substances policy reform, you shouldn't be surprised if they feel unfairly treated.

"The common element in all these deaths is a gun. But the causes are very different, and that means the solutions must be, too."

Nonsense... Proof: Any other country that has introduced strict gun control. It makes all the numbers go down.

Gun violence decreases, but violence as a whole does not.

Source ?

When gun violence decreases, fatalities decrease. A violent attack without a gun is less like to result in fatalities. A suicide attempt without a gun is less likely to result in a fatality, and so on.

Source? Murder rates didn't drop below trend.

https://static.businessinsider.com/image/561817dbbd86ef195c8... http://www.aic.gov.au/media_library/publications/facts/2006/...

The second chart you posted has no labels, title, or context, and as such is pretty useless.

is it bad to look at the first image and think: "needs AB testing"?

Gun deaths went down in the US at a similar pace as the Australian graph, without any significant gun control... http://assets.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/201...

Your chart is gun deaths per 100,000 but the other chart posted was total gun deaths in Australia, so that's not a fair comparison. Here's the gun deaths per 100,000 for Australia: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_al.... You can see from the chart that both the US and Australia show a significant drop in the 1990s. The US levels off by 2000, but Australia keeps dropping through about 2005. It's entirely possible that the further drop could be due to Australia's 1996 gun law.

> It's entirely possible that the further drop could be due to Australia's 1996 gun law.

Since the trendline is basically the same until it tapers off around 2003, it's hard to say; but since the trend is identical (and identically noisy) before and after 1996, it is unlikely it had any effect. You would expect an increase in the trend if it did.

Especially when you compare this to the identical trend in the U.S.[0] and Canada[1] at the time, it's hard to make a case that any effect was experienced.

Homicide in western countries just sorta trended downward since the mid '80s until the early 0ughts.

See:

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_gu...

Or more importantly, see:

http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/10/rate_of_ho...

[0]: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/194/rate_of_h...

[1]: http://www.gunpolicy.org/firearms/compareyears/31/rate_of_ho...

False. In the UK and Australia it didn't even make mass killings go down.

'Nearly two-thirds of gun deaths are suicides' and '85% of suicides are male' but does it mean to purport that 85% of "gun suicides" are male or not? The visualization represents this but the statistics given don't specify. It's misleading and I am curious. It's hard for me to believe that 85% of all suicides are male but it is easy for me to believe that 85% of all gun suicides are male.

I think it's missing a "those". By the way, we could probably do with a content warning somewhere for this subject.

https://afsp.org/about-suicide/suicide-statistics/

"Females attempt suicide twice as often as males. As with suicide deaths, rates of attempted suicide vary considerably among demographic groups. While males are 4 times more likely than females to die by suicide, females attempt suicide 3 times as often as males. The ratio of suicide attempts to suicide death in youth is estimated to be about 25:1, compared to about 4:1 in the elderly"

Suicide rate by any method for males in US at least is 4 times higher than that of females. So maybe more around 80% of suicides in US are male but still quite a disparity.

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/suicide/index.sht...

Ah if you're on a small screen, make sure to be scrolled sufficiently up to the top before clicking through, or it'll be real confusing.

I'd like to see this compared with heroin deaths for the same period. I think the 2015 number for heroin over dose is around 33,000 too.

This appears to require WebGL. If you, like me, are wondering where this alleged interactive graph is, you likely are lacking WebGL support.

Well, it's been flagged. Didn't match what everyone on HN already knows to be true, so it's gotta go.

I flagged because I see this politicized crap on every single social media and news platform, and I'd like HN to be a bastion for just tech news and tech conversation. I don't want to know the political alignment of whoever I'm talking to on HN, I want the conversation to be about tech.

That said, I thought this was a good article, I just don't think it belongs on HN.

> The common element in all these deaths is a gun. But the causes are very different, and that means the solutions must be, too.

I'd like to thank Ben, Matthew, and Reuben for saying this.

It's fashionable to say you have one solution to a broad set of different problems, but it is rare that such a solution actually works out.

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