Am I squinting too hard, or is there more structure to these trends than explained by COVID? In three of these series something happens around 2015, as well as peaking in 2021. Do you work with other series that look like this? Any grand theories?

Fact check: it is correct that in the most recent year of vital statistics data AR has a homicide rate twice that of CA. It’s basically true looking back over the last three or five years as well. AR has a big homicide problem, almost all of which concerns firearms homicides.

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We are grateful for the support @arnoldventures.bsky.social has provided us to maintain this dataset, which has been used by dozens of researchers investigating the effects of firearm laws.

I also want to thank my recent collaborators on this effort: Emily Hoch and Amy Nabel.

As always, you can download the entire law dataset, but in response to feedback about difficulties working with that database, we now offer a page that constructs user-specified law data formatted for time series analysis.

The firearm law visualization now allows users to select from 20 law classes and many more subclasses to see how laws have evolved at the state level over time.

Sea foam flying in the air caught in an eddy under a bridge today

Post an Onion headline that lives rent free in your head

I do not question that perceptions of crime are subject to biases and political interests, just that they are also likely sensitive to reality.