Reporting Recipe: How to use CDC gun deaths data to report in your community
With the launch of the Gun Violence Data Hub, The Trace shared 15 tables of data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that track gun deaths in the United States.
At The Trace, we have used it to report on surging gun deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic, the prevalence of accidental gun deaths, and the rise in gun deaths among children.
This data comes from the CDC’s WONDER tool, which can slice and dice the data by age, race, gender, county, state, and other factors. That makes it valuable to journalists localizing national stories on gun violence, or on the hunt for stories about how the toll of gun deaths hits particular regions and demographics especially hard.
This collection gathers and cleans the WONDER data, so that you can jump straight to reporting.
How to use the data
Here are some questions journalists can pose and answer with this data. The names of the relevant tables are in parentheses, many of which can be further filtered by state or year right before you click download.
Suggested reporting questions:
- What’s the trend in gun deaths in my state or county in recent years?
(gun_deaths_county_year, gun_deaths_state_year) - How do rates of gun deaths differ among different racial and ethnic groups in my state?
(gun_deaths_ethnicity_race_state_year) - How do the trends look different if we drill down on just homicides or suicides? How have these types of gun deaths changed for different racial and ethnic groups in my state, and how does that compare to national trends?
(gun_deaths_ethnicity_race_type_year, gun_deaths_state_type_year) - How does the toll of gun violence hit Americans of varying ages differently?
(gun_deaths_age_one_yr_year, gun_deaths_age_10_yr_year, gun_deaths_age_type_year) - Does gun violence vary in rural areas as compared to suburbs and cities?
(gun_deaths_urbanization_year) - How has the big picture of gun violence changed over the past five-plus decades?
(gun_deaths_year)
Examples
What’s the trend in gun deaths in my coverage area in recent years?
Let’s say you want to examine the trends for New Mexico You can filter for just that state’s gun deaths by year on the dataset page here:
Now, simply eyeballing the data, you can see there has been an increase in the raw number of gun deaths, along with the rates of gun deaths in New Mexico. (We’ve shared this slice of the data in a Google Sheet here.)
And you can begin to ask questions about the driving factors behind this trend, and to explore the human toll of the increasing rates of gun violence in the Land of Enchantment.
How do the trends look different if we drill down on just homicides or suicides?
Let’s look at data for Texas, which had the highest raw number of gun deaths of any state in 2023. You can filter for a state or states and a specific year when downloading:
Next, filter on the injury_intent column to zero in on just suicide and homicide gun deaths. You can see here that the larger number of gun deaths in Texas — 2,697 of them in 2023 — were suicides. This mirrors the nationwide trend, and could be the jumping off point for reporting on gun suicides in Texas.
You can see this in a Google Sheet here, or go ahead and recreate the work by downloading it from the Gun Violence Data Hub yourself. Make sure to download the Data Dictionary to read up on what the different fields in the data mean.
As with all numbers-driven journalism, the data here can help you discover what is going on in your area. But to figure out why, you’ll need to respect the people behind the numbers and do some further reporting.
- Talk to families and communities who have lost loved ones to gun violence.
- Talk to experts about why the figures are rising or falling.
- Consider the ripple effects of gun violence on public health, policymaking, and beats like education, business, and criminal justice.
Reach out to us via our help desk or at [email protected] with any questions, ideas, feedback or criticism. We aim to become the most comprehensive data resource on gun violence in the U.S., and we can’t do it without you.