The Guardian examines gun violence data at the census tract level
Those interested in solution-oriented research and data analysis will want to read this new article in The Guardian. Using newly available data, The Guardian examines gun violence data at the census tract level. The article contains data visualizations that sharpen perspectives on the issue of gun violence. You can find the article here -- Want to fix gun violence in America? Go local.
From the article --
- “We can’t do much about crime prevention of homicide if we try to attack it as a broad, global problem, throwing money at it in a sort of broad, global way,” said David Weisburd, a leading researcher on the geographic distribution of crime at George Mason University.
- "Half of America's gun homicides in 2015 were clustered in just 127 cities and towns, ... [which] contain less than a quarter of the nation’s population."
- "Geographically, these neighborhood areas are small: a total of about 1,200 neighborhood census tracts, which, laid side by side, would fit into an area just 42 miles wide by 42 miles long."
- "Though these neighborhood areas contain just 1.5% of the country’s population, they saw 26% of America’s total gun homicides."
- "Gun control advocates say it is unacceptable that Americans overall are '25 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than people in other developed countries.' People who live in these neighborhood areas face an average gun homicide rate about 400 times higher than the rate across those high-income countries."