
April 20,2017
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, the Gun Violence Archive is an online archive of gun violence data . The GVA claims :
“the Gun Violence Archive an online archive of gun violence incidents collected from over 2,000 media, law enforcement, government and commercial sources daily in an effort to provide near-real time data about the results of gun violence. GVA in an independent data collection and research group with no affiliation with any advocacy organization.”
The organization maps gun violence at a micro level. in 2015 New Jersey 252 gun-related deaths occurred. The results for New Jersey are as one would expect, the data shows that New Jersey’s gun violence was mainly concentrated in Newark and Camden. Well no surprise there.
Over all according to the Guardian News Paper ; “Using this data, the Guardian found that half of the United States’ gun murders in 2015 were clustered in 127 cities . We also found that violence was concentrated even further than simply the city level: census tract areas that contain just 1.5% of the country’s population saw 26% of America’s total gun homicides.”
There was no data on the gun ownership ,be they legal owners or unlawful owners a fact that seems conspicuously absent from this and other attempts to collect gun data.
Disadvantaged communities seemed to suffer the most pronounced impact from the violence, such as in Essex County, where gun violence fluctuated by the percentage of minority residents. The data for 2015 shows particularly low-income, disadvantaged neighborhoods can become hotbeds for gun violence.
There was also no tracking of the impact of sanctuary cites and immigration status although both Camden and Newark are considered sanctuary cities .
Anti gun groups can not glean much from the data , since it suggests that most gun violence is perpetrated on and by a very small portion of the population with no coloration to stringent gun restrictions. Causes seem as uncorrelated as well and solutions seem almost non existent.
more data : https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/