GEOGRAPHIC EVIDENCE THAT GUN DEATHS ARE CULTURAL

My colleagues at Open Source Defense and I were recently pointed to a pretty amazing Geographic Information Systems (GIS) project hosted by The Oregonian, which uses CDC data and population rate data to determine the gun death rate, gun homicide rate, and gun suicide rate within the country on a county-by-county basis. They used data from 2004 through 2010 to have enough data to apply meaningfully to counties with sparse populations. They produced an interactive website, where you can zoom in to any area of the country. Anyone can go to the website itself and zoom in or around any of the maps in this article, to look at them yourself, and we encourage you to do so — don’t just take our word for it.

The first map (top, page 135) shows big swaths of red in the generally “red state” areas of the country, and most of the social media dialogue I’ve tracked on these maps boils down to red-state political bashing and gun bashing. But there are very important things to be gleaned from the following two