A follow up to written assignment #9?

From 538: Murder Rates Don’t Tell Us Everything About Gun Violence.

In the middle of a Tuesday afternoon last December, a shootout erupted at a busy intersection in the Mid-City neighborhood of New Orleans. Nearly 50 rounds were fired, riddling several cars with bullets, yet only one person was hit; the man sustained a leg injury that was not life-threatening.

A year and a half before, in September 2013, an all too similar gunfight took place around midnight in the city’s Carrollton neighborhood. This time, a bullet pierced a nearby home, striking and killing an 11-year-old girl.

These two unrelated cases in one of the country’s worst cities for gun violence can help us understand why murder statistics alone are a bad metric for measuring gun violence trends. Both featured groups of gunmen firing wildly in the vicinity of innocent bystanders, but only one ended in a tragedy receiving extended public attention. So even though 90 percent of New Orleans murders are committed with a gun, looking at total shooting incidents tells us more — by focusing attention on all the gun violence in a city, in addition to those shootings that end in a fatality.1 The open data movement is making it possible to evaluate thousands of shooting incidents and develop analytic insights into gun violence’s big picture. These conclusions in turn can help us evaluate the effectiveness of programs seeking to reduce gun violence.