Our Gun Sickness on Display

The visual representation of lives lost to gun violence....

The NY Times published an article that effectively communicated just how our gun problem is playing out in the USA. The article linked here (is FREE for you!)

The article includes a stunning interactive map where you can search neighborhoods and zoom out to see how many gun related fatalities there were in the last 3 years.

Even more distressing is they also overlaid the racial demographics as a view option, so you can see who the primary victims of this gun violence are.

Spoiler alert… non-white residents in an city are more likely to be impacted.

Perhaps this is another reason for the stunning inaction of Washington?

Here the NY Times graphics editor for the article explains how they got the data, how it’s presented and the takeaways. I found his explanation very informative and worth the listen.

I must say as I navigated this map of deaths, zooming on my neighborhood, and the neighborhoods of friends and family to see the rating and pattern of homicides, it became hard to process that we would let this cancer spread across the entire country this way.

I almost felt like I was looking at the scan of a cancer patient that refused treatment. What will it take for our politicians to stop fomenting this sickness and legislate sensible gun policies?