There are some counties in Wisconsin where you do not want to die.
That’s what I learned wading through a mountain of gun death records the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel acquired from a patchwork mixture of jurisdictions between 72 county coroners and medical examiners as well as local law enforcement.
It’s easy to imagine how someone could get lost in the stack.
After struggling to combine this data for months, picking apart each agency’s definitions for death type, race/ethnicity, and circumstances of death, the reporting team on this project arrived at the most comprehensive analysis of gun deaths ever conducted in the state of Wisconsin.
I visualized our results with a dashboard.
Our analysis found that while mass shootings and single homicides get most of the attention from gun control proponents and detractors alike, those incidents represent only a small slice of who guns kill in Wisconsin.
A majority of people killed by guns in Wisconsin over the last two decades are middle-aged, white, men who are victims of suicide. A growing suicide epidemic in the United States disproportionately affects rural areas.
This dashboard is an attempt to make local and real an issue that is frequently only reported about in the abstract.
View our dashboard to explore an entirely original dataset about gun deaths in Wisconsin. And read more about the implications of our findings and potential bipartisan solutions by reading the project here.
Completed: October 2023
Published by: The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
Technologies used: HTML, CSS (Bootstrap), & JavaScript (D3.js, chart.js) / Python (Pandas) / QGIS
Andrew Steven Hahn 