Gun deaths mapped

A very interesting resource, The Trace.  It maps gun deaths and wounding by location and date since 2014.  I live in Atlanta, among the top cities for murder and gun death rates, so of course, that is what I looked at.

Murder rates and death by gun are of course strongly correlated with effective policing.  Regardless of gun laws, the more active and effective the policing, the lower the murder rate.  Given that Blue states and Blue cities in any state, tend to have weak policing, that is among the reasons that their murder rates tend to be high.  

What the visual maps highlight is also the topography of murder and gun violence.  It again underscores how strong is the correlation between policing strategies and crime.

In our instance, Atlanta has terrible murder numbers, but those numbers are highly concentrated in particular neighborhoods.  Observations:

Murders are very unevenly distributed with some neighborhoods having a lot and some having none.  

In my neighborhood, and its adjacent neighborhoods, there have been no murders since 2014.  Touch on wood that it stays that way.

The murders tend to be most concentrated in the inner most city neighborhoods.

If you zoom out a little, you quickly see that murders tend to be concentrated along particular road systems.  Presumably due to bars and similar establishments.

For my location, the nearest murders are three neighborhoods away, and are along busy city roads lined with bars, tattoo parlors, vape stores, peep shows and the like.  

At first order of approximation, all Atlanta's murders tend to be concentrated in the southwestern neighborhoods and the northeastern neighborhoods tend to be absent gun violence other than a few select drinking streets.

As you keep zooming out to a state, regional, and national level, it takes on the feel of those night time pictures of North and South Korea - South Korea, with its prosperity, is lit up whereas North Korea is dark save a few candles in Pyongyang.  Same here except in terms of gun deaths.  The cities shine out as meccas of gun death.  Outside the cities, there are places you can drive to for an hour or two where there have been no gun deaths for 25 miles either side of the highway for a decade.  

It is like a kaleidoscope.  You can stare at the map for hours, coming up with all sorts of observations and hypotheses.