PennPraxis is working with the The State Gun Law Project, a research initiative that takes a data-driven approach to studying the relationship between gun legislation and gun violence. Praxis is performing geospatial analyses of The State Gun Law Project's gun crime data, a novel dataset that consists of decades of geolocated gun crimes and suspected gun crimes from 34 American cities. While activists, legislators, and researchers have paid significant attention to the influence of gun laws on the incidence of gun crimes, relatively little attention has been devoted to the spatial nature of this relationship. The goal of this partnership is to employ a range of spatial analysis and visualization techniques—including descriptive maps, inferential statistics, and machine learning methods—to produce novel insights into the influence state gun legislation has on the geography of gun violence. The State Gun Law Project intends to share these insights with a broad audience ranging from academic researchers and policymakers to advocacy groups and the general public.
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