Dataset of the Day: Firearm Traces in the USA

The Department of Justice Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives recently came out with a report on firearms trace data from 2007. This report provides state level data on the origins of firearms recovered from crimes for each state. This has drawn much attention from local and state authorities, especially in cities and states that have a high percentage of imported guns from other states such as Maryland, Washington DC and New York City.

I was interested in gaining a better understanding of where guns were coming from and what the spatial pattern was of gun flows so I created a dataset for Finder! that has the data from the report as well as some simple statistics. Some of the maps are quite interesting.

This one, for example, shows the percentage of firearms in each state on the east coast from Virginia.

The next map shows the percentage of firearms from each state that come from out of state. Here the red represents the highest percentage and the green represents the lowest.

This data is available on Finder! in two datasets, one for states receiving guns and the other for states sending guns. Check it out and learn more about the movement of firearms in the USA.