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Intro:. The Debate Over Gun Control Laws Is A Very Controversial

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Intro:
The debate over gun control laws is a very controversial issue in the United States and out of the many issues currently up for debate in American politics, there is no other topic that has a partisan divide quite as deep as the debate over gun control. Few people advocate for mass shootings or other forms of gun violence, except of course for the perpetrators of such actions. It may be easy to blame the recent uptick of gun violence in recent years on the sheer prevalence of guns in American society. After all, if there are no guns that means there should be no mass shootings, right? Many estimates put the number of guns owned by Americans at over 300 million and often more than the U.S. population itself. (112.6 guns per 100 …show more content…

The perception is that mass shootings are usually committed by people dealing with mental health issues that have easy access to firearms.
Data & Methods:
To examine this issue, I decided to retrieve data on mass shootings in the United States from Mass Shooting Tracker, a group that is dedicated to documenting and tracking gun violence in the United States. In addition I decided to seek out gun ownership data that is organized by state. Finally, I decided to obtain data related to general gun crime and gun deaths that occur in the United States to see if any comparison can be made with the mass shooting statistics. Generally, for each of the visualizations presented, I used ggplot in the program R in order to create a scatterplots to examine how gun deaths, gun crime, and mass shootings relate to one another. Furthermore, I will be using the “cor” function to examine correlation results of the data analysis and visualizations. The methods that are being used are a simple but effective way to visualize and examine this data. I believe that this is the best way to get a big picture view of the issue and to get the core answer as to whether or not gun possession results in gun violence.
Results:
Figure 1 provides a good overview of the gun ownership dataset and just overall how gun ownership is distributed across the country. Most gun

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