Deliberative Bodies: Number of Constituents Shot Dead, per U.S. Senator

How many deaths are our Senators responsible for?

In the United States, the 2nd Amendment grants “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms.” Like other rights granted by the constitution, it’s not without limitations. For example, it means that almost anyone can own a grenade launcher, but it does not mean that Chick-fil-A can sell them through the drive-through (“my pleasure!”). Grenade launchers are controlled; you can have one, but first there’s some paperwork.

Similarly, the 2nd Amendment doesn’t protect the current trigger-happy free-for-all. That’s a political choice made, largely, by members of the U.S. Senate. They have the option to pass laws that could save lives, but most choose not to.

Gun violence is valuable to politicians because it’s a “wedge issue.” They use issues like gun safety to turn us against each other because it makes it easier to get re-elected. When we’re busy fighting about whether teachers need guns or schools need smaller front doors, we’re more likely to overlook how little our elected officials do for us.

Their political strategy isn’t without consequences and the states that continuously elect these do-nothings are the ones that suffer the most. For example, in 2020, 500% more people per million died by firearms in Alabama than Massachusets.

This graphic shows how many people from each Senator’s state were killed by guns, during each year they served in office, including homicides, suicides, or other gun-related deaths. The height of each column shows the combination of their inaction (time in office) and how relatively deadly their states are in terms of gun violence. Values are normalized to deaths per million citizens to support comparisons between states.

Data is based on the CDC Wonder database, which gives death counts by state and cause, from 1999 to 2020. Gun-related deaths are based on these ICD-10 codes: X93, X94, X95, X72, X73, X74, W32, W33, W34, Y22, Y23, Y24, Y35, U01.4.

Values before 1999 and after 2020 are estimated. Three Senators above served before 1999. Values for these years were estimated based on a combined model of the CDC data and published reports of homicide and suicide rates attributed to firearm for Alabama, Iowa, and Oklahoma. Values for 2021 and 2022 are linearly extrapolated from the 1999-2020 CDC data.

Dataset and script for estimates are available here:
Deliberative Bodies Dataset