The Education Pattern

On February 14, 2018, a gunman opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killing seventeen students and staff members and injuring seventeen others. Witnesses identified Nikolas Cruz, a nineteen-year-old who had been expelled as a student, as the assailant. Cruz fled the scene on foot by blending with other students. He was arrested about one hour later in nearby Coral Springs. He confessed to being the perpetrator, and he was charged with 17 counts of premeditated murder and 17 counts of attempted murder. Police and prosecutors have not offered a motive and are investigating “a pattern of disciplinary issues and unnerving behavior”, but Cruz offered several motives for the crime.

Seventeen people were killed and seventeen people were wounded but survived their gunshot wounds. Three remained in critical condition the day after the shooting and one remained by the second day.

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On February 20, dozens of Stoneman Douglas High School students went to the state Capitol in Tallahassee and watched as the Florida House of Representatives rejected a bill that would have banned assault weapons. Students strongly criticized the vote.

Many student survivors criticized the response from politicians and asked them not to offer condolences but to take action to prevent more students from being killed in school shootings.

It is important to underline that there may be other confounding variable that need to be accounted for and that led to firearm ownership and crimes. In fact, we chose to further explore the question of race by analysing the Firearm Fatalities rate patterns in Florida. We subtracted the firearm fatalities rate from xxx (source institution name) then visualize the data into map of Florida counties. We found the northern part is overall darker than the southern Florida, and inland counties seem suffering more from firearm crimes compared to coastal counties in southern Florida.

When it comes to the percent of population over 25 years old with Bachelor’s Degree or above, it revealed the similar pattern that southern part is more well-educated in general compared to northern part and coastal places have higher proportion than inland parts. The association was more obvious in several counties. For example, three counties with deepest colour in second map, Alachua, St. Johns and Leon, all have low firearm fatalities rate. While counties like Taylor, Dixie and Union also showed lowest Bachelor’s Degree ownerships.

This seems to suggest that whilst education level do not fully capture the complexity of the dynamics gun usage, it most certainly had an influential role in the appropriate firearm use. This suggests that education level would play an important role in firearm use, other variables, like personal hobbies, cultural influence may be also worth investigating.