Oregon web dev company Periscopic was so moved by December’s school shooting in Newtown, CT, they decided to use their skills to map gun deaths. A self-described “socially-conscious” data visualization firm, they used FBI-provided 2010 gun death data to create a real-time interactive graph that details the “lost years” victims might have lived.
Their calculated total for the 9,595 people in 2010?
413,908 stolen years.
Oregon web dev company Periscopic was so moved by December’s school shooting in Newtown, CT, they decided to use their skills to map gun deaths. A self-described “socially-conscious” data visualization firm, they used FBI-provided 2010 gun death data to create a real-time interactive graph that details the “lost years” victims might have lived.
Their calculated total for the 9,595 people in 2010?
413,908 stolen years.
Our data comes from the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports, which include voluntarily-reported data from police precincts across the country… containing details of each person who was killed, including their age, gender, race, relationship to killer, and more.
For the gray lines, we calculated alternate stories for the people killed with guns using data from the World Health Organization. To calculate an alternate story, we first performed an age prediction weighted according to the age distribution of US deaths. Using this age, we then predicted a likely cause of death at that age. We do not adjust for life-expectancy differences between demographic groups, as we have not yet found data to that extent. We used data from 2005, the most recent year available.
Users can select individual lines in the graphic and find the circumstances involved in the death. Lines lowest in height are the youngest in age. Users can also bulk filter the data by gun type, ethnicity, sex, and more.
Since the data processes on computers in real time, it can be performance heavy depending upon device and connection. The graphic presentation can be begun by clicking here.
