"...a pretty amazing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) project hosted by The Oregonian, which uses CDC data and population rate data to determine the gun death rate, gun homicide rate, and gun suicide rate within the country on a county by county basis...
Here’s the interactive website, where you can zoom in to any area of the country.
You can go to the website itself and zoom in or around any of the screenshots in this article.
We should talk about these maps.
Deaths are expressed as rates per 100,000 population, and above average rates are red, while below average rates are blue.
The first map shows big swaths of red in the generally “red state” areas of the country, and most of the social media dialog I’ve tracked on these maps boils down to red-state political bashing and gun bashing.
But there are very important things to be gleaned from the following two maps, which dis-aggregate the deaths by homicide and suicide.
Gun suicides account for about two thirds of gun deaths, so this map is going to look generally like the first one.
No huge surprises here.
But there are many regions red in the “deaths” map that flip blue in the “suicide” map, and the reason why is clear when you look at the “homicide” map, here:
No huge surprises here.
But there are many regions red in the “deaths” map that flip blue in the “suicide” map, and the reason why is clear when you look at the “homicide” map, here:
Look at the differences in these last two maps.
We hear a lot of banter from the “anti-gun” media that these problems are gun problems, and they’ve concocted this “gun deaths” number in order to lump these into the same problem and gloss over the differences.
But if the problem were “guns,” then the hot spots on the suicide map and the hot spots on the homicide map would coincide, and would be related to gun ownership rates.
There are only a few places where they overlap. Most of the hot zones for suicide have low homicide rates, and most of the hot zones for homicide have low suicide rates.
The difference is stark.
Let’s zoom in..."
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