Looking at Gun Control
Guns are inherently political. From the minute they were invented, they changed a lot of things about the world, enough that today gun regulations are talked about all over the US. Gun control remains a highly disputed topic, often getting people’s hotpockets quite hot.
The background information on modern arguments for higher gun regulations lie largely on ethics. Nobody wants people to die unnecessarily, and people see news of shootings or of homicide rates, and it understandably scares and upsets them. The second amendment plays a large role in this topic, as it states that citizens can have guns, yet many people argue that it’s not an unlimited right: they argue assault weapons and certain types of guns shouldn’t be allowed, as they would be more prone to be used in shootings. Similarly, many argue that high-capacity magazines allow for more mass shootings, as they allow more damage to be done in smaller amounts of time.
Many people argue that with more guns around, there are more homicides with them, since criminals will find ways to access guns, especially the ones talked about above. They argue that increasing gun regulations, background checks, and bans on those weapons would decrease shooting death rates, reduce the number of mass shootings, and do so without consequences: data shows that weapons for self-defense are almost never used.
To take the other side, many people take the second amendment to heart, and believe the founding fathers would have wanted the complete freedom to have firearms. They believe that this right allows people to defend themselves even if those scenarios are unlikely, and provide a feeling of safety. Also, those who hunt and/or use guns for sporting purposes should have the right to do so, without infringement by the government. The issue of government intervention also gets people worked up, as many believe that too much governmental regulation on guns could stem from the government trying to assume more power and take it away from the people, essentially preventing the opportunity for revolts, should they be deemed necessary. The first part of the second amendment even reads ‘A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State’.
Other people entirely argue that gun control laws would prove ineffective, citing evidence such as Mexico’s failing efforts to contain gun violence. Also, in the past, gun control efforts have been attacked, by people saying they are racist. Often, these efforts target neighborhoods of certain demographics in ways that arguments can be made as to whether the efforts themselves discriminate. Finally, some say that people who want to commit crimes will find ways, with or without heavy gun regulations.
The mass shootings that we hear about are real (despite conspiracy theorists denying them), and have real consequences and tear families apart. Additionally, they are high violations of each of Richard Schweder’s Three Ethics: they violate the autonomy of peaceful co-existence, the community aspect of living together, and the divinity aspect of avoiding sin or temptation.
While writing this article, I acknowledge that just like everyone else, I have biases. My whole life, my family has hunted, and so I grew up around shotguns, rifles, pistols; basically everything except assault weapons. With this, however, my parents made sure to instill the importance of treating every gun with respect and as if it were loaded, as well as always keeping them a serious topic and nothing to joke around about. With all of this, I may be biased slightly towards freedom from higher gun control, as I have used guns my whole life. On the other hand, I grew up in a very democratic city and moved to an even more democratic college town, whose values tend to press that more gun control is a good thing.
I’d say that I follow news a normal amount, and therefore I hear anytime there’s a mass shooting, or controversial ones such as police shootings. If one only followed news, especially over the past ~10 years, they might assume that rates of homicides have gone way up. I wanted to dive into this topic, from a data science approach, to see what was actually going on around the country. Are the rates actually going up as much as people are saying they are? To start, I decided to look at the crime rates of Chicago, whose suburban areas are known as some of the most dangerous places in the country. The city of Chicago publishes this data, so I fired it up into a Jupyter notebook.
The above code snippets show that the dataset had around 6.8 Million crimes in Chicago, between 2001 and 2019. There were plenty of variables and angles to look at this massive dataset, so I plotted out some preliminary charts.
Undeniably, the answer to my first question in Chicago is that the overall crime rates have gone WAY down in the past 20 years. Comparing 2001 to 2018, they’ve dropped nearly 40%. Luckily, the dataset had more variables, so I broke it down further.
It looked as if the majority of decreases in crime stemmed from Theft, Battery, Narcotics, and Criminal Damage. For some other measures, I looked at specifically Ward 6, which contains the Englewood neighborhood, which is known as one of the most notoriously dangerous neighborhoods in America. Also pictured is the overall counts of domestic assault.
These results blew me away. Overwhelmingly, crime in Chicago, and even Englewood, has gone down. Many people around the country debate politics of gun control, and yet Chicago’s crimes are going down. However, while these results might stand on there own, I wanted to get some context and look at what outside factors may have influenced these rates, so I read up on events that happened and measures being implemented in Chicago over the last 20 years.
Here’s the thing: all of these plots are fine and good, and although they may seem convincing, they hardly answer questions of gun control. I wanted to understand what’s going on with gun violence, so I made another plot looking at only homicide rates, with the same labels.
This defies all other arguments above: homicide rates stayed steady, until increasing in 2016. Although overall crime may have dropped, homicide rates went way up, and in 2015, there were 18 incidents in which 4 or more people were shot to death.
Why were crimes dropping, but murders increasing?
I found data on overall trends in Chicago since 1957 to help put it in perspective. Even though numbers have dropped since the 70’s and 90’s, it’s awful that homicide counts in the past couple of years have almost reached those numbers, especially since they were due largely to mass shootings of 4+ people.
This poses a very interesting problem, as depending on the way that you choose to analyze the Chicago crime dataset, you could spin an argument any way you want. Bias comes into play, as one could cherry pick to support their own argument. Mental models fill in gaps in knowledge, and people could be misled, depending on which interpretation of the data they see.
Before doing this analysis, I had assumed that rates of crime had dropped, simply because that was the rumor that I had heard enough to believe it. It was the repetition of confirmation bias: it got to the point where I would sort of ignore or brush off when I heard about crimes, because I thought I knew better. I didn’t have the full picture, but now I (believe that I) do, and can see that despite crime rates dropping, murder rates have spiked recently, and it would be ignorant to assume their randomness: more than likely there’s a reason for these increases, which could be institutional issues or political ones.
In the same way that I didn’t have the whole picture and was going off of rumors, I see a big problem with this room for misinterpretation, as most people haven’t done as much analyzation as I just did. The overkill backfire effect affects people, as it did for me, by convincing people that there’s lots more overall crime happening, just because they see one type of crime happening (homicide). In other words, they group overall crime and homicide rates together, simply because it’s easier. In the same way, the sensemaking backfire effect (people preferring an incorrect explanation over an incomplete one) may affect people with these results, since people like to gossip, and they might come to their own overall conclusions.
To compare Chicago to somewhere else, I looked at the crime data of Los Angeles as well, doing similar charts.
It seems as though LA didn’t follow the same patterns as Chicago over the last 10 years. However, the two cities that I looked at do not necessarily represent the nation’s rates as a whole, and it shouldn’t be assumed so. Maybe Chicago’s findings will stick out more due to the bizarreness effect, since it’s so easy to dismiss things that are normal, and to focus on newer discrepancies, whether or not they really hold ground.
This example shows the importance of data while discussing social issues, because I (and hopefully you, if you’ve been paying attention) now know the true crime and murder rates of Chicago, and you can use them in discussion as true facts. If you walk into an argument with data on your side, you win that argument, because you can point at tangible things that back up what you are saying. It’s up to the analyst to interpret it without bias, but with due process you can avoid this.
Thousands of people die from shootings every year, unnecessarily, and we need to do something about it. I don’t have the answer, but it’s very important that when we are talking about these heavy topics, we are being fair to all sides, and attempt to avoid any biases that we all have. Shootings in Chicago have gone way up in the past couple of years, and the cities murder clearance rate has plummeted as well. I didn’t know any of this before doing this project, which shows that I’m an example of how people have their own mental models of a situation before knowing the real facts: its natural. I hope that this post helps show you why it’s important to look at discussions, as well as data analysis, holistically. Interpretations can completely skew results, and lead to heavy confirmation bias, which really does affect people and could lead to misinformation and discord across the country.
