538 Doing Special on Gun Deaths In America

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Bartholomew Roberts

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http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

This is a news website that got its start predicting sports based on a "moneyball" like approach, then branched out to predicting elections (thus the "fivethirtyeight"). Many of the writers have a solid background in statistics and while they tend to be a bit left-leaning, they are math nerds at heart and their analysis of the numbers is usually solid. Sometimes, they aren't great about addressing contrary sets of numbers; but they appear to have done a fair job in this series on guns. Lots of useful information for those who are interested in the raw statistics.
 
Wow. I'm amazed at how you can play around with the data they provide.

It's not the first time I've had the following thought but the graphic display made it even more sad to see all the suicide gun deaths.
 
They use several sets of data including the one that Mother Jones uses for mass shootings; but they also note the problems with the data as well as noting that even using this data it isn't all that clear that several favorite gun control solutions are effective in actually reducing gun deaths.
 
I frequently enjoy FiveThirtyEight articles... they are mostly unbiased and just present data, I love me some data :D
 
That is excellent data presentation to put things in perspective either for those who don't know but want to or those who are convinced they already know!

This is the sort of information I'd like to have presented to the EU on EU gun death statistics but with a further breakdown of whether were illegally possessed/obtained guns.

That is one aspect that is the at the crux of gun control propositions as its the easiest to control, yet doubtless the least effective.
 
What is missing in their statistics....

What is missing in their statistics, is data on non-gun related homicides, data on which gun deaths in their stats were successful justifiable homicide, data on suicides without guns, data on accidents not involving guns.....etc.

I'm sure that they lumped justifiable homicides (ie, successful self-defense against criminal aggression) in with all the other homicides, thus inflating the "bad" statistics.

Same with suicide. While it's tragic, the fact is that those people made a choice to kill themselves, and probably would have done so without a gun if they didn't have one. Suicides should be taken out of gun death statistics, to get a clearer picture. And the rest of us should not have our rights violated because some people choose to kill themselves. Work on the causes of suicide, not the means.
 
The stats are for gun related deaths. The fact they shed light on exactly how many are indeed self inflicted is already way more than anti gun lobbyists have done. They would spout the 33k number in a sentence about mass shootings and never elaborate further.

I think anyone who has anti gun leanings should first be confronted with these numbers and the fact that not all of them are with legally owned weapons...
 
As GM1967 points out, simply tabulating "homicides" is misleading. A murder perpetrated by a serial killer is a homicide. The shooting of a mass murderer by a police officer is also a homicide. In general, society tends to disapprove of the former but approve of the latter, so lumping them together makes the statistic more or less useless.
 
Thanks for posting. I enjoyed it.
So if we can convince those in suicides to jump off buildings or bridges instead we can cut gun deaths by more than half... If applying the peer pressure on that was politically feasible...

139 under 15 suicides. I think looking at the specifics of those cases would be productive.
Same with the 59 under 15 accidents.
And the 8 undetermined under 15.
I guess those are average numbers, but many of those 206 cases are probably tragedies with common threads that can be nearly eliminated. For instance in the case of someone under 15, I can believe not having a gun available might significantly reduce the chance of a successful suicide over the long-term.

More info on the approximately 270 "undetermined" deaths would be interesting.

I don't think there is much that can be done in regard to stopping the other deaths in terms of any sort of restrictions or education on firearms. Shifting them to other types of deaths, sure, but probably not stopping them.
 
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