Date created

Project uploaded on 23/05/2019

Investigate FBI gun data to understand which variables are most associated with high gun per capita

Introduction

In this project I investigate the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), which is used to determine whether a prospective buyer is eligible to buy firearms or explosives. Gun shops will call into this system to ensure that each customer does not have a criminal record or isn't otherwise ineligible to make a purchase.

The dataset (gun_data.xls) contains the number of firearm checks by month, state and type. It is completed by another dataset (U.S. Census Data.csv) which contains several census variables at the state level.

Over the course of the report, I will try to answer three questions:

What is the overall trend of gun purchases?
Which states have high gun per capita?
Are low education, low income or high poverty associated with high gun per capita?

First I am going to wrangle the data and clean it so I can proceed with an exploratory data analysis. During this second step, I will compute useful statistics and create visualizations to get a better understanding of the data. Finally, I will summarize my findings and answer the questions.

You can have access to all my detailed code and analysis in the Jupyter Notebook.

Software requirements

You should have Python3, Numpy, pandas and Jupyter Notebooks.

Credits