The State Gun Law Project (SGLP). is a research initiative that takes a data-driven approach to studying the national gun violence crisis. The SGLP recently created a novel dataset composed of historical geolocated gun crime data and gun laws for 34 American cities. In partnership with PennPraxis, the State Gun Law Project was interested in conducting an exploratory spatial analysis of this new dataset in order to further understanding of the gun violence crisis in America.
Eugene conducted a variety of spatial analyses to explore the geography of gun violence in the nearly three dozen cities in the dataset. By mapping the diverse patterns of gun crime clustering and dispersion in the data, he was able to show that gun violence operates at different spatial scales in different cities. While gun crime hotspots in some cities are smaller scale, occurring at the block or street level, hotspots in other cities are much larger, covering entire neighborhoods or districts. Additionally, Eugene conducted longitudinal analyses of the data to see how patterns of gun violence changed over time. One surprising finding from this analysis was that in several cities where overall gun crimes had been dropping over time, such as Chicago, the few areas that had witnessed rising gun violence rates were actually among the wealthier neighborhoods in the cities.
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