The current situation is very loud and clear, everyone has sternly put across their points of view and rightly so, loss of life is not a trivial social issue. The people who are fighting against guns, most of them have never been on either side of one. The people who are fighting for guns, most of them take pride in this part of their American identity. Unfortunately, the majority of the people who actually misuse guns are not included in either of the two groups above. As a society we are trying to solve a puzzle by advocating that “our” one specific piece is the final answer.

“If you can see something, and it is wrong, you can fight it with a reasonable chance of success. Fighting the nonexistent is worse than pointless: Don Quixote tilted at windmills, but at least windmills are real.”

Half baked knowledge is more dangerous than ignorance. Major media platforms have perfected the art of bringing the best information available to the masses( forgiving the times they don’t ). However the information available at this instant is not our best work, not even close to it. Shunting proper research on gun violence on the federal level has had an expected ripple effect to the lowest level where, due to budget cuts, we just haven’t worked on the problem enough.

Historically, when the species faced a daunting problem, we gathered the smartest of the bunch and asked them to work on the problem. We have a lot of PhDs working on designer babies, artificial intelligence and space travel but somehow we failed to get some smart people working on this problem. Gun policy research has been understudied for decades, being one of the most fundamental part of any viable solution. Even our toothpaste is checked by a scientist before it reaches market, and rightly so. However our public opinion is checked by a celebrity and pushed by a politically charged editor, very wrongly so.

Fortunately we live in a very forgiving world nowadays, we don’t need to have expertise in a specific field just to gather some educated insights about any given problem. We’ll go over a not-so-scary dataset about gun violence to try and gain better intuition about America’s gun problem. Should take us 5 minutes.

Overview of the data

The dataset presented here was first uploaded to Kaggle, as a challenge to data scientists around the world. The data was downloaded from gunviolencearchive.org and has a record of more than 260k gun violence incidents in the US between January 2013 and March 2018, inclusive. You can find all the submissions to the challenge here.

The data in and of itself is not complete, real world datasets hardly ever are but even if we account for the missing data, we can still mine out some eye-opening insights. Please find the detailed analysis here.

Worried about the wrong guns

A huge response from the public to the gun problem has captured solutions like completely taking away the right to own semi-automatic rifles and implementing a more strict background check to the new guns being purchased. Predictably, these solutions got an equally strong opposition from current gun owners.

When we run the data to see which types of guns were used in all the documented cases, we see a an interesting picture.