Introduction:
The group members for our Geography 370 Final project are Aiden Chanhee Hwang and Henry Kwan. Our project will focus on comparing murders involving firearms to overall homicide rates in the United States, where gun control law is not applied. Furthermore, we are going to compare it to Canada, where gun control law is applied. Our data will be expressed as a percentage analysis. The data that we will be using for our project will be obtained from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) from the United States government website. We will use the data, manipulate the excel datasheet and join the table to our base map of the United States.We both thought this project was an interesting topic to tackle because we want to know whether the reason why the United States has such a high number of gun violence, ranked one in the world, due to not having gun control laws or not.
As a result, we began to do more research by tackling this issue to better understand the social issues for our final project. The main goal of our project is to determine whether gun control laws affect to reduce the gun violence. To do this analysis, we will focus primarily on the state of Maine to represent the United States overall since the data collected from the FBI shows that there were a small number of murders and a high percentage of murders involving firearms dominated in 2018.
To address some of the issues after our project presentation, we have adjusted the colour on the map so that it is cartographically pleasing to the map user, adjusted the size of the north arrow, and changed the title of our project to properly address the fact that not all gun violence is necessarily murder. To make this a GIS project, we made a second map to correlate gun violence and homicide with a high number of murders with a high percentage of murders, high number of murders with a low percentage of murders, low number of murders with a high percentage of murders, and a low number of murders with a low percentage of murders across states on the US mainland. This is the correlation we will use for our project and will address our project goals. Finally, our project will compare gun-related murders in Canada using dissemination areas as Canada does not have permits to firearms. Our final project will address several concerns relating to guns and our goal is to get a broader view of crimes in North America.