WOW - An Examination of U.S. Gun Murders

[moobu2]

Published on Mar 11, 2013
Using data from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation's Uniform Crime Report, this data exploration tool visualizes the gun murders that took place in 2010, the most recent year for which data is available.

The Uniform Crime Report includes voluntarily-reported data from police precincts across the country, and represents more than 285 million U.S. inhabitants—94.6% of the total population, containing details of each person who was killed, including their age, gender, race, relationship to killer, and more.

What the dataset does not contain is an assessment of the potential life that was stolen from these individuals as a result of their murder.

To calculate that, we used the World Health Organization's UNSD Demographic Statistics, and performed an age prediction weighted according to the age distribution of U.S. deaths, paired with a likely cause of death at that age.

Update 3/11/13: We've added near real-time data for gun deaths in 2013. While the data isn't from an official source, it does help us get an idea of the gun-related violence that happens every day. The 2013 data also includes suicides and gun accidents which offers a more comprehensive understanding of the effect of guns in our country.

[calimary]

1. When I first heard the statistics for gun-related killings - "like a 9/11 every month"

I was just dumbfounded! But yeah. The numbers worked out to an average 3,000 gun-related killings per month. Approximately the number of victims in the 2001 World Trade Center attack. Stunning.