The Atlas of American Gun Violence

The Trace's An Atlas of American Gun Violence is an interactive map that uses data from the Gun Violence Archive to visualize gun homicides and assaults across the contiguous United States.

The map has drawn a fair amount of criticism on the MapPorn subreddit, with many dismissing it as “just a population density map.” I think this criticism is somewhat unfair.  If you were to zoom in on a similar map of most European cities you would not see the same density of shooting. Even in European cities with higher population densities than most U.S. cities, the level of gun violence is nowhere near as intense. 

That said, it is true that raw counts of shootings will naturally correlate to some degree with population - areas with more people tend to have more incidents simply because there are more potential interactions. However, the degree of concentration of gun violence in certain U.S. cities, and even within particular neighborhoods of those cities, points to factors beyond mere population density.

The ability to zoom into individual cities can reveal stark differences in the distribution of shootings between neighborhoods in the same metropolitan area. If the visualization were just a proxy for population, we’d expect a much more uniform spread within each city. Instead, the data exposes clear geographic patterns -some neighborhoods suffer disproportionately high levels of gun violence, while others in the same city remain relatively unaffected.

Finally, the map’s interactive filters allow users to explore incidents by location, date range, fatal versus non-fatal shootings, and categories such as mass shootings, accidental discharges, officer-involved incidents, and those involving children. These features make the map more than just a static population density map; they turn it into a powerful tool for understanding the scale, nature, and distribution of gun violence across the United States.