Team Members: Rene Martinez, Eltahir Gotar, and Aaron Snytka.
GUN AND BACKGROUND CHECK
Gun control is a very sensitive issue in America and has been throughout our history. The debate about changing the
Second Amendment and introducing more strict gun laws has been going on for years. In this project we looked at
gun laws at state level and analyzed their effectiveness in lowering gun's related deaths. We also evaluated the
idea that stricter gun laws reduces gun's related deaths.
Time period for this analysis is from 1999-2018. We used the states of Texas and California as a case study for two reasons:
1- They are the most populous states in America.
2- California is an obliged (applicants will be granted license as long as they meet extensive requirements). While
Texas is a non obliged state (applicants will be granted license as long as they meet basic requirements) Learn More.
Description/Outline: THE EFFECTIVENESS OF BACKGROUND CHECKS ACROSS STATES WITH OBLIGED AND NON
OBLIGED BACKGROUND REQUIREMENT IN RELATION TO CRIME RATES DUE TO GUN DEATHS
Data sources:
- Mass shooting data downloaded from Everytown for Gun safety Support Fund everytownresearch.
- Gun laws data downloaded from opendatasoft website Opendatasoft.
- Populations data from Census bureau Census.
- Gun related death data from CDC.
- Firearm mortality data from CDC.
- Firearm data from gunpolicy website gunpolicy.
- The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) data from the bureau of justice bjs.
- Firearm background checks data from BuzzFeedNews.
We tried to answer three questions in this analysis. from 1999-2018:
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What are the firearm's related death rates in Texas and California?
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How do the background checks and other gun laws effect firearm's related death rates?
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How many mass shooting incidents happens in both states?
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Parse background check data for Texas and California from 1999-2018, store in a table, and plot a line graph for each state showing the time frame.
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Parse firearm related crime rates in Texas and California from 1999-2018, store in a table, and plot each state’s result in a line graph.
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Determine if there is a correlation between background checks and firearm related crimes by creating a scatter plots of Texas and California showing background checks and firearm related crime rates.
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Draw a map of mass shooting in both states for the timeframe of the analysis.
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Make graphs for each task.
First:
We looked at gun related deaths for each state.
As you can see from the above chart:
General trend is that Texas gun related deaths is going up while California is going down, however, through out the
course of this analysis time from 1999-2018, California numbers are very much the same in 1999 and 2018. Indeed,
Texas have more gun related deaths in 2018 than California, but overall, California numbers did not improve much.
This become more obvious with next analogy.
Second:
We looked at state total number of gun laws vs gun related death for the same period of time.
Overtime the state did not introduce alot of laws, only five new laws from 1999 to 2018. Once again, the number of
gun related death is going up in a study pace.
For Calfornia, they introduced 35 new laws for the same period and the number of deaths is fluctuating up and down,
however, in term of numbers the change is not that much from 1999 to 2018.
Third:
We looked at mass shooting in both states:
The numbers are not study, however overall, Texas number are going up while California's are going down.
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Overall, our study indicate that increasing gun laws slightly correlate with decreasing gun related deaths.
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Further study need to be done. use Texas and California as sample population and run statistic analysis to determine if thay represent the remaining U.S.A populations.
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As stated early, gun laws and Second Amendment are very controversial issues and very political at the same time. Many arguments can be made in both side of the isle, however everyone seems to agree on one thing:"We Need to Stop the Violence Across the Country".