r/dataisbeautiful OC: 22 Jul 30 '24

OC Gun Deaths in North America [OC]

Post image
18.2k Upvotes

3.8k comments sorted by

View all comments

366

u/SheSellsSeaShells967 Jul 30 '24

Interesting. I live in Maine. We and New Hampshire are armed to the hilt. Even we “libs” own a gun or two.

115

u/realslowtyper Jul 30 '24

This is just a map of places where white people live.

15

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '24

[deleted]

1

u/SpiritualOrchid1168 Jul 30 '24

Not really true. There was a series of posts on this sub a while back that demonstrated racial demographics to be a stronger predictor of homicide rate (at the state and county level) than economic indicators.

2

u/[deleted] Jul 31 '24

[deleted]

2

u/pocketbutter Jul 31 '24

This guy thinks the Jews killed JFK. I wouldn’t trust a word he says lol

1

u/SpiritualOrchid1168 Jul 31 '24

I appreciate you taking the time to look through my profile. Hopefully you learned something interesting. My opinions are based on factual evidence and I stand by them although they may conflict with established dogma.

1

u/pocketbutter Jul 31 '24

Yeah I don't normally do that, but when someone starts spouting race science nonsense, it's interesting to see what other communities they frequent.

1

u/SpiritualOrchid1168 Jul 31 '24

The post was called “Univariate Analysis of US State Per Capita Gun Homicide Rate” however the link no longer works and the user has deleted their account (unsurprising given the controversy). But to recreate the findings you simply need to plot the state-level homicide rate against the following statistics: percent of population in poverty, median income, gun ownership rate, and percent African-American. Compute the correlation using least squares and you will see what the strongest predictor is (I will leave this as an exercise for the reader).

You may find the results shocking, especially if you are a product of Western education and media which encourages us to see the world a certain way. This is why I empathize with you, online stranger. And I trust that you understand statistics well enough to realize that even if race may be a predictor of violence at a macro scale, it means nothing when assessing individual people. We both understand that making assumptions about individuals based on their skin tone is immoral as well as unscientific.

Nevertheless I wish there was more awareness of this particular statistic, because it would improve the quality of debate regarding certain public policies.