The Hint’s An Atlas of American Gun Violence is an interactive map that makes use of knowledge from the Gun Violence Archive to visualise gun homicides and assaults throughout the contiguous United States.
The map has drawn a good quantity of criticism on the MapPorn subreddit, with many dismissing it as “only a inhabitants density map.” I believe this criticism is considerably unfair. Should you had been to zoom in on an analogous map of most European cities you wouldn’t see the identical density of taking pictures. Even in European cities with greater inhabitants densities than most U.S. cities, the extent of gun violence is nowhere close to as intense.
That mentioned, it’s true that uncooked counts of shootings will naturally correlate to a point with inhabitants – areas with extra individuals are inclined to have extra incidents just because there are extra potential interactions. Nonetheless, the diploma of focus of gun violence in sure U.S. cities, and even inside specific neighborhoods of these cities, factors to elements past mere inhabitants density.
The power to zoom into particular person cities can reveal stark variations within the distribution of shootings between neighborhoods in the identical metropolitan space. If the visualization had been only a proxy for inhabitants, we’d anticipate a way more uniform unfold inside every metropolis. As an alternative, the information exposes clear geographic patterns -some neighborhoods endure disproportionately excessive ranges of gun violence, whereas others in the identical metropolis stay comparatively unaffected.
Lastly, the map’s interactive filters enable customers to discover incidents by location, date vary, deadly versus non-fatal shootings, and classes comparable to mass shootings, unintentional discharges, officer-involved incidents, and people involving kids. These options make the map greater than only a static inhabitants density map; they flip it into a robust instrument for understanding the dimensions, nature, and distribution of gun violence throughout the USA.
