
Gun Violence in the US from 2013-2016 - ddigges
http://deborah-digges.github.io/shooting-viz/index.html
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mjs7231
If you look at the colors, it seems gun violence is much worse in later years.
However, if you look at the scale it tells the opposite story; gun violence
was far greater in 2013. Also, 2016 isn't over yet, it should be scaled
appropriately (which we can only assume is not). This chart is useless as it
is.

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ddispaltro
Yeah that is pretty ridiculous, it is non-obvious that the scale changed.

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DougN7
Makes me wonder if it is purposely misleading.

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mcphage
The scale being inconsistent from year to year is terrible, it leads readers
to make inferences that aren't true, and makes it very difficult to understand
how gun violence has changed in the time period shown.

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dymk
Any source on where this data comes from? Also, this is very visually
misleading. If you're not looking at the key closely, it's changing quite a
bit between years.

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DigitalJack
I wish the scale didn't change per year.

Does anyone else find the gun crime in Washington DC strange and/or ironic?

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ddigges
You're right. The scales changing don't allow changes in states over time to
be seen. It is strange isn't it?

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torgoguys
> It is strange isn't it?

And I assume intentional. This is your work and submission. Exactly what
statement are you trying to make? A way to deceive with diagrams?

EDIT: To explain, I haven't looked at the raw data, but reading the diagrams
and taking the scale changes into account, there aren't especially big
differences year to year, but you're led to believe there are. There could
even be an overall nationwide decline for all I know, but the misleading
rescaling makes it hard to determine by just looking at the images.

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DigitalJack
I suspect the "it is strange, isn't it" portion of the comment was meant to be
a separate idea and the commenter just failed to make it a separate paragraph.

It (the strangeness) is referring to a separate idea in my post, which was the
crime level in Washington DC, not the scaling.

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SteveLAnderson
California's population in 2013 was 38.4 million. According to the map, 2
Californians per million were affected by firearm violence that led to death,
so that'd be about 77 people killed by firearms.

According to "Homicide in California 2013"
([https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/cjsc/publicati...](https://oag.ca.gov/sites/all/files/agweb/pdfs/cjsc/publications/homicide/hm13/hm13.pdf))
Table 21, in 2013, there were 1,699 homicide crimes where the type of weapon
used was a firearm.

That's just crime data, it doesn't include suicides.

Am I reading this wrong or is the data way off or is it indicating some other
kind of firearm violence?

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microcolonel
1,225 was the number of firearm homicides recorded in 2013, according to that
publication. 1,699 was the number of homicides where a weapon was "known".

But yeah, still _totally_ off, AFAICT. I also wonder where she got the
supposed 2016 data, given that 2016 hasn't happened yet.

Other interesting tidbits from that PDF: almost as many people were killed
with ropes, as with rifles. About half as many were killed with knives and
blunt objects as were with handguns. Hardly epidemic, if you ask me.
Considering how much more convenient it is to kill somebody with a firearm,
you wonder why it's not really that much more popular.

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steego
Maps and graphs are usually used to tell a story or to highlight an
interesting pattern. Am I missing something here? All I see is a color coded
map whose colors change volatilely because the scales are changing.

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polartx
>tell a story or to highlight an interesting pattern

the story here is how visualizations are leveraged to manipulate peoples'
conclusions. Especially when the conclusions inferred by the data directly
contradict the authors' own.

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ddigges
This is the source of the data:
[http://www.shootingtracker.com/](http://www.shootingtracker.com/). Thank you
all for the feedback, I'm just getting into the field and I'm sorry for the
very commonplace mistakes I've made with this chart. Rest assured I will fix
them and make sure that I keep these suggestions in mind in the future. Thanks
again!

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jayess
I get a blank page with just the title and the drop-down boxes at the bottom.

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ddigges
Perhaps the d3 library isn't loading. What's the error you see in your network
tab?

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karzeem
Mixed Content: The page at '[https://deborah-digges.github.io/shooting-
viz/index.html'](https://deborah-digges.github.io/shooting-viz/index.html')
was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure script
'[http://d3js.org/d3.v3.min.js'](http://d3js.org/d3.v3.min.js'). This request
has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.

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rgbrenner
go to the http version of the page, and it works fine. [http://deborah-
digges.github.io/shooting-viz/index.html](http://deborah-
digges.github.io/shooting-viz/index.html)

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ddigges
I've updated the visualization to correct all the mistakes it was making

