San Francisco Chronicle & The Washington Post & The Guardian – 2017-10-15 23:08:33
http://projects.sfchronicle.com/2017/gun-violence-in-america-on-oct-1/
October 1, 2017: America’s Deadly Day
Emma O’Neill / San Francisco Chronicle
(October 15, 2017) — On Sunday, Oct. 1, in Las Vegas, 59 people were killed and more than 241* wounded in the deadliest mass shooting in modern US history. But that shooting was just one of dozens of gun-related incidents that claimed American lives that day.
Here is a look at the toll of gun violence across the US on October 1.
[On the interactive site,] Hover over dots to see details.
There were 30 gun-related incidents reported across the country where no one was injured and no one was killed, according to reports compiled by the Gun Violence Archive.
88 people were shot but survived, not including victims of the Las Vegas shooting.
48 people were shot dead, not including those killed at the Las Vegas shooting.
Gunfire in Lawrence, Kan., left three people dead: Leah Brown, 22; Colwin Henderson III, 20; and Tre’Mel Dean, 24. Two others were wounded.
In the Las Vegas shooting, 59 people were killed and 241* people were shot and injured.
In all, Gun Violence Archive figures show 139 gun-related incidents occurred in the US on Oct. 1.
Across the country, 107 people were killed, and 329 were injured that day.
Americans die as a result of gun violence every day. The estimated number ranges from 42 to 93 people killed by guns on an average day.
Data is recorded by Gun Violence Archive, an independent research and data collection group established in 2012.
This dataset was last updated on Oct. 4 at 2 p.m. and only includes events verified as of this time.
Gun violence includes the results of all incidents of death or injury or threat with firearms.
* Gun violence injuries only include injuries sustained by firearms. Gun Violence Archive is still verifying injuries from the Las Vegas shooting and therefore this number is lower than other reports.
Trump Promised to End the “American Carnage”
But Gun Deaths Are Up 12 Percent
Christopher Ingraham / The Washington Post
(July 27, 2017) — Gun deaths are up over 12 percent year-over-year. Firearm injuries are up nearly 8 percent. The number of children under the age of 12 shot by a gun has increased by 16 percent, while instances of defensive gun use are up nearly 30 percent.
Citing “the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential,” President Donald Trump promised in his inaugural address that “this American carnage stops right here and stops right now.”
But the numbers above from the Gun Violence Archive, a non-profit that tracks shootings via media reports and law enforcement records, show that in the first 200 days of 2017 the carnage has only gotten worse.
In the first 200 days of 2014, for instance, the Archive’s team of researchers tallied 6,206 gun deaths, not counting suicides. Three years later that figure has jumped by well over one-third, to 8,539 fatalities.
Since 2014, total firearm injuries are up 50 percent. Shootings of children are up by nearly 30 percent. Reports of defensive gun use have doubled.
Trump’s rhetoric aside, there’s little a president can do in his first six months in office to influence violent crime trends in any direction. The Archive also doesn’t offer any speculation about what’s driving these numbers. “We provide very little analysis, and that’s intentional,” the group’s founder Mark Bryant recently told the Lexington Herald-Leader. “We want people to be able to draw their own conclusions.”
Other research has found that the nationwide homicide increase of recent years masks considerable regional variation. In many major cities, like Baltimore, Chicago and Cleveland, homicides are rising sharply. In others, like New York, homicides are actually falling.
The Gun Violence Archive’s numbers suggest that in 2017, gun homicides are rising faster in some cities than they’re falling in others. A small portion of this rise may be attributable to more media attention and better measurement techniques. But in the past few years the Gun Violence Archive’s fatality numbers have tracked closely with the slower, more deliberative data from official sources like the CDC and the FBI.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions has made reducing violent crime a priority for the Department of Justice. He created a special task force on the topic, charged with delivering recommendations to the Attorney General’s office by this week.
Sessions has taken several concrete steps so far intended to reduce homicides and violent crime, including increasing the use of mandatory minimum prison sentences, boosting the use of civil asset forfeiture to take property from suspects before they’re convicted or charged with wrongdoing, and threatening to withhold federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities.”
None of these interventions are likely to have a significant effect on gun violence. Research has shown mandatory minimum sentences have little deterrent effect on violent crime. On asset forfeiture, one recent study found that expanding the practice reduced property crimes somewhat but had no effect on violent crime.
Cracking down on “sanctuary cities” may even turn out to be counterproductive, as research has shown they tend to be less violent than cities without such policies in place.
Research has shown repeatedly, however, that one of the chief risk factors for gun crime is the availability of guns: more guns, more crime. Under the Obama administration, perpetual fears of pending crackdowns on gun ownership (that never materialized) helped drive record numbers of gun sales, putting millions more firearms in circulation.
Under Trump, however, fears of federal gun-grabs have subsided, driving gun sales down as a result. If that trend continues, it may prove to have more of a concrete effect on gun violence than any policy his administration pursues.
Christopher Ingraham writes about politics, drug policy and all things data. He previously worked at the Brookings Institution and the Pew Research Center.
Mapping US Gun Murders at a Micro Level:
New Data Zooms in on US Violence
Aliza Aufrichtig on The Guardian US interactive team
(March 20, 2017) — We spend a lot of time talking about which cities see the most gun violence. But analyzing gun violence at the city level is very misleading. Gun violence is much more local than that.
The Guardian is releasing a new set of nationwide data for 2015 that maps gun murders at the micro level — down to the local census tract. You can use this data to do analysis of how gun murder clusters within neighborhoods in your city or state.
Our analysis was possible thanks to the not-for-profit Gun Violence Archive (GVA), which tracks shootings and gun deaths using media reports. This data set includes the latitude and longitude of each shooting incident.
We mapped each of these geolocated gun murders to a census tract — which means that there’s a wealth of demographic data connected to each census tract, allowing you to analyze the levels of poverty, educational attainment and other factors in neighborhoods where gun murders happen.
This article contains the data we used to conduct this analysis. We invite you to download this data and use it for further analysis and reporting. If you use this data, please make sure to credit the Gun Violence Archive and the Guardian.
Using this data, the Guardian found that half of the United States’ gun murders in 2015 were clustered in 127 cities (Want to fix gun violence? Go local).
We also found that violence was concentrated even further than simply the city level: census tract areas that contain just 1.5% of the country’s population saw 26% of America’s total gun homicides.
We appended a few other fields to the existing GVA data. Using the FCC’s Census Block Conversion API, we placed each incident within its proper census tract. With the census tract identified, we used the Five-Year American Community Survey 2014-2010 to find demographic information for the tracts. We also determined the land area of each tract with the US Census: Cartographic Boundary Shapefiles — Census Tracts.
We’ve also included a separate easy-to-use file of FBI murder data from 1985 to 2015.
If you have questions about the data, please email gundata@theguardian.com. If you use this data to do your own analysis — whether you’re a journalist or a community organization — please let us know, and send a link to your final project to gundata@theguardian.com, or contact our reporters directly: lois.beckett@theguardian.com and jamiles.lartey@theguardian.com.
Get the Data
Each file is a .csv, which can be opened in Excel and Google Sheets, in addition to the text editor of your choice. All GVA data is from 2015, but you can obtain data from 2014 to the present by going to their website or following them on twitter @gundeaths for daily updates.
Incident-level data — each row includes a gun homicide incident.
City-level data — each row includes a city or county (depending on how it was reported by the GVA), as well as counts for incidents and people killed.
Tract-level data — each row includes a census tract, as well as counts for incidents and people killed.
Previous stories have made use of UCR data, which we obtained from the FBI.
City-level murder data from 1985-2015 — each row is a city, and includes the murder rate and raw number of murders for each year from 1985-2015. Some years are missing for cities. National data on city murder statistics from 2016 will not be available from the FBI until the fall of 2017.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, Section 107, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
