Boston.com Collecting Data on Gun License Per Capita by Town

Pittsfield 62.3 2,657 42,652 190

I'd like to see current data on this, as well as data on the increase after the old COP left, and the number of old FID cards that were allowed to expire and whose owners never sought a new license.. I know several folks myself that were victimized by that fiasco, and that's all I have to say on the subject.
 
Here is a pretty cool site that helped me put the data into perspective. http://profiles.nationalrelocation.com. It gives number of households, median ages, number of children etc.

I found that we have about 2400 households and about 600 licensed gun owners in town. Certainly some household have more than one gun owner but most do not. That means that there about one in four houses have at least one gun in the house. Add the folks that let their "lifetime" FID cards lapse and the old timers that brought a .45 back from Korea or Nam.

Pretty encouraging when you consider that we are just about 20 miles from Boston.

Thanks to the OP for the great post
 
We're ranked #2...[dance] Wonder what would happen if I moved? [wink]


Uh... nothing? Its number of gun owners, not number of guns. That means that your town would have 92 gun owners instead of 93. You might fall to 3rd.

I for one hope they never post number of guns per thousand residents. I think that some of you people might make the numbers look ....lopsided. Before the huge accident at the NES annual yacht race. Damn that was a tragedy.
 
Let's now superimpose the crime stats and you'll see that the towns with the most guns per capita are the safest and the towns with the least guns per capita have the most crime. It's easy to see looking at the data.
 
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Uh... nothing? Its number of gun owners, not number of guns. That means that your town would have 92 gun owners instead of 93. You might fall to 3rd.

I for one hope they never post number of guns per thousand residents. I think that some of you people might make the numbers look ....lopsided. Before the huge accident at the NES annual yacht race. Damn that was a tragedy.

I'd like to be included in the next yaucht race.
 
Let's now superimpose the crime stats and you'll see that the towns with the most guns per capita are the safest and the towns with the least guns per capita have the most crime. It's easy to see looking at the data.

This is actually a really good idea. I know that there are some real smart folks here that could probably do it in about six minutes with an Excel spread sheet. Then we send it to every media outlet and politician in the world about a thousand times a week.

Someone needs to ask Terraforma to do this on his lunch break
 
8.3% license holders here in Westfield...and this is a really really green town. I'll second the spreadsheet idea...I'll see what crime stats I can find!
 
This is actually a really good idea. I know that there are some real smart folks here that could probably do it in about six minutes with an Excel spread sheet. Then we send it to every media outlet and politician in the world about a thousand times a week.

Someone needs to ask Terraforma to do this on his lunch break

I'm no stats Guru, but I threw this together in under 6 minutes.

I used Excel to take the top ranked 5 towns with over 2k population, and compared them to the lowest rank 5 excluding Boston. I did not have a great source of crime data for every town in MA, so I manually pulled the CityData.com crime index for these 10 places. 2 of the 5 pro-gun towns didn't even have data reported. Here is what I tossed together:

Community License per 1,000 Population Rank ▴ Crime Index

Pro Gun:
Shelburne 212.8 2,035 6 31
Huntington 198.3 2,219 10 n/d
Hardwick 185 2,649 17 120.6
Lanesborough 174.8 2,866 23 n/d
Cheshire 159.9 3,314 31 21.9

Anti Gun:
Amherst 15.5 35,565 344 144
Lawrence 14.4 70,014 345 327.2
Brookline 10.4 54,896 346 139.5
Chelsea 9.4 41,577 347 676.2
Cambridge 9.2 105,596 348 253.9
 
Let's now superimpose the crime stats and you'll see that the towns with the most guns per capita are the safest and the towns with the least guns per capita have the most crime. It's easy to see looking at the data.

This is actually a really good idea. I know that there are some real smart folks here that could probably do it in about six minutes with an Excel spread sheet. Then we send it to every media outlet and politician in the world about a thousand times a week.

Someone needs to ask Terraforma to do this on his lunch break

This.
 
My town's not bad around 50. I think the data is probably skewed a bit though, there are a lot of old timers here that probably never re-upped the license but still have guns around....
 
I'm no stats Guru, but I threw this together in under 6 minutes.

I used Excel to take the top ranked 5 towns with over 2k population, and compared them to the lowest rank 5 excluding Boston. I did not have a great source of crime data for every town in MA, so I manually pulled the CityData.com crime index for these 10 places. 2 of the 5 pro-gun towns didn't even have data reported. Here is what I tossed together:

Community License per 1,000 Population Rank ▴ Crime Index

Pro Gun:
Shelburne 212.8 2,035 6 31
Huntington 198.3 2,219 10 n/d
Hardwick 185 2,649 17 120.6
Lanesborough 174.8 2,866 23 n/d
Cheshire 159.9 3,314 31 21.9

Anti Gun:
Amherst 15.5 35,565 344 144
Lawrence 14.4 70,014 345 327.2
Brookline 10.4 54,896 346 139.5
Chelsea 9.4 41,577 347 676.2
Cambridge 9.2 105,596 348 253.9

That is awesome. The figures were actually alot easier to read in the reply window. Now if we can get a couple of bar graphs and pie charts we can begin our education campaign.[grin]
 
That is awesome. The figures were actually alot easier to read in the reply window. Now if we can get a couple of bar graphs and pie charts we can begin our education campaign.[grin]

If no one has put together anything superior... i'll see what I can hook up at work tomorrow when I'm not half in the bag and not working on a laptop while watching TV [wink]
 
I'm no stats Guru, but I threw this together in under 6 minutes.

I used Excel to take the top ranked 5 towns with over 2k population, and compared them to the lowest rank 5 excluding Boston. I did not have a great source of crime data for every town in MA, so I manually pulled the CityData.com crime index for these 10 places. 2 of the 5 pro-gun towns didn't even have data reported. Here is what I tossed together:

Community License per 1,000 Population Rank ▴ Crime Index

Pro Gun:
Shelburne 212.8 2,035 6 31
Huntington 198.3 2,219 10 n/d
Hardwick 185 2,649 17 120.6
Lanesborough 174.8 2,866 23 n/d
Cheshire 159.9 3,314 31 21.9

Anti Gun:
Amherst 15.5 35,565 344 144
Lawrence 14.4 70,014 345 327.2
Brookline 10.4 54,896 346 139.5
Chelsea 9.4 41,577 347 676.2
Cambridge 9.2 105,596 348 253.9

Great work.

This would seem to be helpful in refuting the nonsense that COPs aren't arbitrary in how they approach licenses.

How can it be that some towns have 125/1000, 84/1000, etc. and others have 9 to 15/1000?

I can't believe it's social differences of the populations.

Just look at Boston, where they claim guns are a plague on the citizenry....

Licensees are about 6/1000 and licensees in my town are about ten times that rate and we have no where near the level of gun crime that Boston does!
 
It's really interesting how many towns on the Cape or Islands are relatively high on the list (Edgartwon, Oak Bluffs, Chilmark, etc.).

It sort of makes you think some of the big city's yuppies or 'in crowd' use their island residences to get their LTCs



Here's another VERY interesting statistic...

The combined top TWENTY cities/towns by population have an average of only 2% LTCs! The top ten have 1.7%!
Amazing!
 
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The real gold here is that we can take this data, and compare it to other data points. Like murders, and crime, and race, and....
Now, what we need is As v. Bs v. FIDs, v. restrictions... :)
Yes, what type of license and restrictions would be very helpful.

I'm going to pull out the text data file and play with it a bit in MATLAB.

Also, I'm curious to see the percentage of gun owners state-wide not including Boston and Cambridge... note how much those two cities skew the results!
Do you realize that this story is 1 year old. If searching worked here in any decent fashion, you'd be able to find a thread about this from back then.
I also wonder how much licensing has gone up since then, methinks a significant amount.
I'm no stats Guru, but I threw this together in under 6 minutes.

I used Excel to take the top ranked 5 towns with over 2k population, and compared them to the lowest rank 5 excluding Boston. I did not have a great source of crime data for every town in MA, so I manually pulled the CityData.com crime index for these 10 places. 2 of the 5 pro-gun towns didn't even have data reported. Here is what I tossed together:

Community License per 1,000 Population Rank ▴ Crime Index

Pro Gun:
Shelburne 212.8 2,035 6 31
Huntington 198.3 2,219 10 n/d
Hardwick 185 2,649 17 120.6
Lanesborough 174.8 2,866 23 n/d
Cheshire 159.9 3,314 31 21.9

Anti Gun:
Amherst 15.5 35,565 344 144
Lawrence 14.4 70,014 345 327.2
Brookline 10.4 54,896 346 139.5
Chelsea 9.4 41,577 347 676.2
Cambridge 9.2 105,596 348 253.9
Awesome! Nice work.
 
I'm no stats Guru, but I threw this together in under 6 minutes.

Community License per 1,000 Population Rank Crime Index

Pro Gun:
Shelburne 212.8 2,035 6 31
Huntington 198.3 2,219 10 n/d
Hardwick 185 2,649 17 120.6
Lanesborough 174.8 2,866 23 n/d
Cheshire 159.9 3,314 31 21.9

Anti Gun:
Amherst 15.5 35,565 344 144
Lawrence 14.4 70,014 345 327.2
Brookline 10.4 54,896 346 139.5
Chelsea 9.4 41,577 347 676.2
Cambridge 9.2 105,596 348 253.9

Chelsea is not anti-gun!
9.4 is only the LEGAL gun owners per 1000 citizens. [smile][wink]
 
Guess this proves that all the drive by shootings in Boston, Roxbury, JP and the like are not from licensed gun owners. Either that or the nearby towns are causing the problems.[shocked]
 
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