The Guardian released a new set of nationwide data for 2015 that maps gun murders in the U.S. down to the local census tract. The newspaper says the data can be used to analyze how gun murder clusters within neighborhoods. The data were provided by the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive, which tracks shootings and gun deaths using media reports. This data set includes the latitude and longitude of each shooting incident.
Using this data, the Guardian found that half of the U.S. gun murders in 2015 were clustered in 127 cities. Violence was concentrated even further than the city level: census tract areas that contain just 1.5 percent of the U.S. population saw 26 percent of gun homicides. The Guardian encourages journalists and community organizations to use the data to analyze crime trends.