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Former good articleGun violence in the United States was one of the good articles, but it has been removed from the list. There are suggestions below for improving the article to meet the good article criteria. Once these issues have been addressed, the article can be renominated. Editors may also seek a reassessment of the decision if they believe there was a mistake.
Did You Know Article milestones
DateProcessResult
November 14, 2006Peer reviewReviewed
November 30, 2006Featured article candidateNot promoted
January 9, 2007Good article nomineeListed
October 1, 2007Good article reassessmentKept
June 25, 2008Good article reassessmentKept
April 6, 2015Good article reassessmentDelisted
Did You Know A fact from this article appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the "Did you know?" column on November 12, 2006.
Current status: Delisted good article

Statistics have become a soup

The sourcing and citation of statistics on homicide have become a mishmash, bouncing around year to year and source to source, to the point that anyone reading with any attention will ask themselves which, if any, are accurate.

  • 2013, 11,208 firearm homicides, CDC, second sentence, first graf, lede.
  • 2012, 8,855 firearm homicides, UNODC, first sentence, second graf, lede.
  • 2010, 11,078 firearm homicides, NCHS, fourth sentence, second graf, lede.
  • 2015, 13,286 firearm homicides, Gun Violence Archive via BBC, first sentence, third graf, lede.
  • 2012, 8,897 firearm homicides, FBI, first sentence 'Homicides" section

It would look far more encyclopedic if the article stuck to _one_ count for homicides, and one reliable source, and one particular year throughout - obviously, the most recent statistics are the most relevant, except when discussing historical trends. The FBI has been accumulating violent crime statistics for more than seventy years, and their numbers have never been called into question (at least, outside of the tinfoil hat crowd). They are the gold standard. The FBI just released their 2015 data a week ago, and unless we are trying to suggest wildly varying firearm homicide counts in a very narrow number of years, the most current data seems to me to be the best. As well, the FBI numbers are the most consistent over recent years - see https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2015/crime-in-the-u.s.-2015/tables/expanded_homicide_data_table_8_murder_victims_by_weapon_2011-2015.xls , rather than the wildly varying counts from other sources. If firearm homicides had dropped from 11,078 in 2010 to 8,855 in 2012, it would have represented a gigantic drop in the actual rate, which would have been front-page news coast to coast. Likewise if the number had increased back up to 11,208 in 2013. It's fairly obvious that the other sources are counting total homicides in inaccurate ways, rather than firearm homicides. Again, the FBI expanded homicide data shows the most rational dataset, particularly against the rates with growing population. And in the balance, it provides a far more consistent and encyclopedic attention to details. As the numbers above show - we are only confusing readers with these different sources. I would propose cleaning up the article with the FBI figures. Anastrophe (talk) 04:16, 5 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

I agree that we shouldn't just present conflicting or inconsistent statistics without any explanation. But different sources may use different methodologies, which doesn't mean that one is right and the others are wrong. The section "Research limitations" gets into that issue. Rather than stripping out statistics from sources that are otherwise considered reliable, it'd make more sense to compare and contrast them.
Do you know of a source which rates them, or which calls the FBI's numbers the "gold standard"? Felsic2 (talk) 23:57, 28 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]
This source, Firearms and Violence: A Critical Review (2004) , in a chapter titled "Data for Measuring Firearms Violence and Ownership", actually says

"The National Crime Victimization Survey, which relies on self-reports of victimization, is an ongoing annual survey conducted by the federal government (i.e., the Census Bureau on behalf of the Department of Justice) that collects information from a representative sample of nearly 100,000 noninstitutionalized adults (age 12 and over) from approximately 50,000 households. It is widely viewed as a “gold standard” for measuring crime victimization."

Of course the NCVS isn't perfect. But neither is the FBI's Uniform Crime Reports, which are compiled from voluntary submissions by local LEO agencies, and which excludes entirely some types of incidents.
This complexity makes me think that rather than cutting information we should add more, to explain the difficulties in gathering these numbers. Felsic2 (talk) 00:09, 29 October 2016 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

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"Thoughts and prayers"

Page watchers may be interested in "Thoughts and prayers". Thanks, --Another Believer (Talk) 20:00, 2 October 2017 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

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Mass shooting section need

There needs to be a section about mass shootings tthat brings up multiple variations of the term and it's definition. The Gun Violence Achieve is only one source. There's on entire article for mass shootings. I assume there might as well be one for here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_shootings_in_the_United_States Graylandertagger (talk) 23:19, 6 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Yes there are a few sentences in the article now that could be pulled into a subsection of Homicides with a Main tag. Coverage here should be limited to high-level content per WP:SUMMARY STYLE. VQuakr (talk) 00:34, 21 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Dispute over images at top of article

Previous/reverted image
Disputed proposed image

I changed the image at the top of the article from the drawing of the McKinley assassination to an image of the memorial flowers around the Welcome to Fabulous Las Vegas sign from the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. To me, the McKinley drawing is hardly representative of the subject of this article and would, if anything, be more appropriate at the article on assassination or William McKinley. I find that reason alone to be enough to say the drawing is inappropriate to this article.

But, each time I changed the image as shown to the right, user:VQuakr and user:Miguel Escopeta quickly reverted my edits, claiming that "the historical perspective is best," and accusing me of violating WP:RECENTISM. To answer that, I would say that historical perspective vs. current perspective is a matter of opinion, and WP:RECENTISM in this particular dispute does not even apply: the level and type of gun violence in the US today is simply not comparable to gun violence in the past, whether 30, 50, 100, or 150 years ago. And going hand-in-hand with that, the issue of Vegas-style gun violence isn't recentism in the sense that we are giving undue focus only to current events: we are coming up on the 19th anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre. I am trying to WP:AGF but it is not easy. I believe that these reverts are an attempt to sanitize gun violence by falsely equating the "historical" gun violence of 120 years ago with the gun violence in the US today. I am going to stop short of accusing anyone of WP:AGENDA yet, but it is on my mind.

I request consensus on this narrow question: which picture is more appropriate to the article. And before some helpful editor offers the third solution of having no picture at the top of the article, let me say that I am simply not interested and will not support that non-solution. Darkest Tree Talk 02:14, 21 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]

Given the massive scope of this article, I would expect that there are a large number of images that would meet the applicable MOS guideline at WP:LEADIMAGE. To summarize, that section instructs us to: consider excluding an image for complex topics (despite your odd attempt at preemption); naturally represent the topic; be what the reader would expect to see in a high-quality reference work; and avoid unnecessary shock value.
I do not think that an image of a memorial to a mass shooting meets this guideline very well: it doesn't inform the reader much about the topic of the article, it is related to a mass shooting (an uncommon [<1%] type of gun violence in the US), and it is very recent - despite your protests, the scope of this article does not just cover the last few years. So for these reasons I prefer the status quo over your suggested alternative. That said, I do not think the McKinley image is perfectly ideal and would be open to other alternatives. I think minimum criteria for me to consider them would be compliance with WP:LEADIMAGE and including a firearm of some type somewhere in the image.
As an aside, your apparent beliefs about recent violence in the US is a common misconception: murder in the US is less common per capita than it was 30 years ago, and much less common than it was hundreds of years ago. VQuakr (talk) 04:53, 21 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, @VQuakr:, I believe you were leaving this post as I was leaving one on your talk page. Apologies for any crossed wires. Moving on, I wasn't aware of WP:LEADIMAGE, but thank you for pointing me to it. Certainly there are a large number of images that would meet the guideline; I just picked this one because I felt it fit the best. I don't believe my proposed image has shock value; it's just a makeshift memorial around the sign; nothing graphic. I agree that it is recent, but I didn't choose it because it is recent, only because it is representative of the single worst act of U.S. gun violence, which seems to me just as appropriate as using an image of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami as the lead image on the Tsunami article. If the worst act of gun violence in the U.S. had been 20 years ago, I like to think I would have chosen an image from that incident instead, but that's just me speculating now. I'm still not sure why my chosen image doesn't comport with WP:LEADIMAGE: the topic isn't so complex that this image isn't quite clearly representative of it; and it does naturally represent the topic; it is in my own opinion exactly what a reader would expect to see in a high-quality encyclopedia; and it doesn't have unnecessary shock value. Darkest Tree Talk 05:11, 21 February 2018 (UTC)[reply]
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Gun_violence_in_the_United_States&oldid=826821402

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