When you see it.... (gun deaths in Florida)

hi boomer

i'm interested in who put this graph out, not who supplied the info, i bet most people would only see what appears to be a downward trend, where as, if i'm reading the info right, the exact opposite is true

djjd! Hello!

Exactly -- they numbered it from top to bottom, completely flipping how charts are usually made. It's weird.

The graph was put out by Reuters, but as the graph says, its source was the "Florida Department of Law Enforcement" but that could just mean the information and not the graph.

Could it possibly be a typo by whoever put the numbers into the graphing software (that being they inverted the numbers and put them into the wrong box)? I hope that's the case here. (((fingers crossed)))

I suppose clerical error could explain it but it seems intentionally deceptive to me.

I wonder what the original size of the graph was as printed in newspapers. Unless you see it big it's really hard to catch the "mistake".

If you ignore the odd layout, it shows a steady decrease from 1990 until the "stand your ground" law was enacted, after which there is a sharp increase. The graph needs to be fixed, but i'll bet the data is reliable.

Someone fixed the chart.



The chart data is from the Florida Uniform Crime Reports.

See Florida Statewide Murder by Firearm, 1971 - 2013

The UCR Guide Manual states that "justifiable homicides are not counted as murders" so these numbers likely exclude some homicides covered by Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law.

But "stand your ground" was supposed to make people safer from murderers and clearly that didn't happen.

Excluding justifiable homicides doesn't make any difference since they most likely weren't counted before either.

I wonder what happened in the early 90s to make the murder rate drop so quickly...

From purely a statistical standpoint - I'd wonder more what happened in the 1990s to bring down murders. It seems looking at the graph that is where the abnormally is --- you have huge changes during that period whereas the other periods seem the norm in a sense.

What you look for when you look at stats is trends and during the90s seems to be all over the place with a trend downward (or upward depending how you view the graph) --- there seems nothing noted at the 90s where a trend seems to change. Only at the other end.

When you view stats -- you need to look at many things -- not just one change -- maybe there was an increase in police involvement, maybe there was the opposite change in gun law from stand your ground, maybe there was an influx of crazy people into FL recently. That is the hard part with stats - there is a number of things that could influence stats and sometimes they can be opposing items.

Florida cops kill bystander, but charge suspect they were trying to shoot with her murder
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/08/28/florida-cops-kill-bystander-but-charge-suspect-they-were-trying-to-shoot-with-her-murder/