Went digging through the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports archives to make this chart. Banning “assault rifles” is not going to significantly reduce murders. If you want to fix that problem by regulating firearms, you’ll have to look at handguns.

Inspired by Mark Reid’s post illustrating the bimodal relationship between the density of guns in a population and the number of gun homicides, I’ve created a slightly different plot from the same data, designed to illustrate a slightly… muddier relationship. This is an expanded variant of homicides vs guns, all countries, but scaling firearm homicides by log(10) shows the relationships between low-homicide countries.

library(directlabels)
library(lattice)

guns <- read.table("guns/data/guns.csv", sep="\t", header=TRUE)
deaths <- read.table("guns/data/deaths.csv", sep="\t", header=TRUE)
oecd <- read.table("guns/data/oecd.csv", sep="\t", header=TRUE)

data <- merge(guns, deaths, by="Country")
data$OECD <- data$Country %in% oecd$Country

plot(
  direct.label(
    xyplot(Homicides ~ Guns, data,
           group=Country,
           main="Homicides vs. Guns",
           xlab="Guns per 100 people",
           ylab="Homicides vs 100k people",
           scales=list(y = list(log = 10))),
    "top.points"))

Okay, this is officially the coolest peripheral ever.