Berry's Statistical Journal

I’m currently in the process of researching gun laws by state. My goal is to classify each state into one of four or five categories. Some criteria I’ll be using for grouping are open carry laws and concealed carried laws including if you need a permit and at what age you can get a permit. The goal is to separate the states in a way that doesn’t leave one of the categories with only one or two entries.

Switching to a different topic, I noticed when looking at my mapping of each shooting that the East Coast and West Coast had different race distributions. On the East Coast, there was a large quantity of black people being killed while the West Coast had Hispanics as its majority. The West Coast also had more concentrated clusters of shootings, but that’s likely due to large amounts of land being undeveloped such as deserts and mountains or plains and farmlands.

This week I’ve been focusing on locational statistics. Using the longitude and latitude, I plotted each data point on a US map. I am also making a heatmap by county and state since that will be easier for me to read than my current plot.

For next week, I’ve found an external dataset containing educational data for each county in the US. This information may correlate to some of the features of the victims such as race or mental disability status. I also found Hugo’s idea of political affiliation to be very interesting and want to see if red states or states with concealed carry laws have a higher rate of police shootings involving victims armed with some kind of firearm.

The semester started this week. For MTH 522, I created this site to document my weekly work. I’ve also downloaded and begun to examine our police shootings dataset. My primary direction at the moment is to utilize the state attribute and outside data referencing each state’s population.