Gun Control Effectiveness

In recent years, mass shootings have made headlines more often than ever. According to a study done by the FBI from 2000 to 2018, the average active shooter incident rate from 2000 to 2009 was 8.6 incidents per year, whereas from 2010 to 2018 the average active shooter incident rate rose to 21.2. This massive jump in mass shootings is not the only problematic statistic related to this topic either. The highest number of gun deaths since at least 1968 (when the CDC began recording these statistics) had occurred in 2017.

This is a clear issue in America and something has to be done. Many can agree with that sentiment although what cannot be agreed upon is how to go about fixing the issue. Some believe that it is a mental health issue and others believe that it is a gun ownership issue. Regardless whether both play a role in the rising rates of gun deaths and mass shootings, we must take action and look at the science.

Gun control laws are any legal measure created to prevent or restrict the possession or use of guns. For example, universal background checks, meaning that for every sale of a firearm a background check must be done on the purchaser. They can range from universal background checks all the way to gun confiscation.

A gun death is any death that was caused by a gun. The most commonly thought of type is an intentional murder with the use of a gun although suicide by gun and unintentional deaths by guns are also included in this statistic. According to Pew Research Center, in 2017, 60% of gun deaths were suicides, 37% were murders, and the remaining 3% were classified as other.

The main questions I asked during my research was:

• Do gun control laws have an effect on gun violence and if so, what gun control laws are the most effective?
• Is there a correlation between gun deaths and another statistic such as poverty, education, or mental health?

When I initially decided to do the topic of gun control effectiveness I knew that finding good datasets could be difficult. Although to my surprise I found many interactive websites that used data and statistics to show either gun death rates or states and their respective gun control policy level. For example, Giffords.org is a website that is dedicated to helping gun control laws get passed. They have a section of their website that is all about the statistics and correlations between gun control laws and gun death rates for each state. After finding several of these types of websites I knew that the data was out there but I could not find any useable datasets. So I decided to create a dataset of my own. For all 50 states I gathered the gun death rate, the gun strictness grade (A-F) and the ranking for that specific state's gun strictness (1-50) and several other demographics like poverty rates and overall crime rates. To get this data into ArcGIS pro I also put the latitude and longitude for each state into the spreadsheet. I created a locator and got my data into the map as 50 individual points on each state. From there I was able to use a united states boundary dataset I obtained from ESRI data and maps and use the summarize within tool for the data within my dataset.

One type of data that I struggled to obtain data was political data. Finding what laws are in enacted where was very difficult and I only achieved a small amount of success. My success was finding a few statistics pertaining to how well a few gun control laws prevented homicides. I also had difficulties finding good crime datasets. I found several datasets of crime in cities like Detroit, Austin, and Atlanta although finding a statewide dataset or a dataset that listed gun deaths/gun violence was very difficult to find. Unfortunately I was unable to find enough of this data to come to any conclusions.

Above on the left is a map displaying the gun death rate in each state per 100,000 people and on the right is a map displaying the gun strictness ranking of each state based on the amount and severity of gun control laws in effect. As seen there is a very strong correlation between the two maps.

With the very strong correlation between gun death rates and gun strictness ranking I questioned whether it was the gun control laws at work or if there were other correlations and not just coincidence. The next three graphics are comparisons of gun death rates with violent crime offenses per 100,000, poverty, and education.

As shown above, the violent crime rates do not have nearly the same level of correlation to gun death rates as to that and gun strictness. Two standout examples of a reverse correlation are California and Wyoming. California has the 7th lowest gun death rate at 7.45 deaths per 100,000 although it has the 9th highest violent crime offense rate of 441.2 offenses per 100,000. California is also the strictest state in terms of gun ownership. This shows that even though California's overall crime rate is high, the percentage of those violent crimes that involves guns are quite low. Wyoming shows the exact opposite trend. Wyoming has the 5th highest gun death rate at 21.09 per 100,000 and the 8th lowest violent crime offense rate at 217.4.

As a general trend all across the nation, when poverty rises, crime does as well. When looking into this trend to find similarities, some states were high in both poverty and gun death rates like New Mexico, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. All four are almost the highest in both categories although there were still many states that did not align with the trend like New York, Kansas, Wyoming, and several other northwest states.

When analyzing the gun death rates and high school graduation rates, the correlation is very weak. On the gun death rates map, a large cluster of southern states have high gun death rates and are all a dark blue color. When comparing the same region on the high school graduation rate map, the same cluster of states are a light color resembling their high graduation rate. This flip flop strongly disproves the correlation between less education proves higher gun death rates.

The three most effective gun laws are universal background checks, bans on violent offenders purchasing/own handguns, and "may-issue" laws. Universal background checks require the purchaser to have a background check to be conduced as well as the store to record every sale of a firearm. The checks involve criminal records and are usually conducted by the FBI. These laws have proven to reduce the gun homicide rate by an average of 15%. Bans on people who have committed a violent crime owning a handgun have shown to reduce gun homicide rates up to 18%. "May-issue" laws give police discretion as to who they give out concealed carry permits to. States that have all three of these laws in place have seen 36% reductions in gun homicide rates.

As shown above, the level of gun strictness has a highly positive correlation to gun death rates. This answered my question as to if gun control laws work and clearly they do. As I researched other demographics that could show potential correlations and lessen the validity of the main comparison, I found no real correlation. The violent crime rate did not seem to line up with the gun death rate as some states with high amounts of crime have very little amounts of gun deaths. Poverty is not a viable comparison either as there are states in which are very high in poverty and have very high gun death rates as well as many states where poverty and gun death have opposing values. Lastly, education was taken into account and this statistic had little to no correlation with gun death. The three most effective gun control laws were also eluded to and they further prove the fact that gun control laws work as all three laws reduce homicide rates substantially.

The important first step in every public issue is awareness. Getting this information to the public would help make up the minds of millions and change would begin. It is important that more data is collected pertaining to this issue as it was the largest hurdle for me to overcome. I had to create every dataset on my own and it made it much harder and more time consuming to find correlations. GIS makes it easy to analyze demographics and find where a problem lies especially a topic like crime. A type of data that I was unable to find was data involving laws. A dataset showing what laws a city, county, or state had would make it extremely easy to show what laws work and what laws don't and in turn make our political system much more efficient.