Overview
In the United States, a store employee ensures that a customer does not have a criminal record before they purchase a firearm. The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) is used by Federal Firearms Licensees to determine whether a prospective buyer is eligible to buy firearms or explosives.
I have visualized the FBI NICS Firearm Background Checks dataset and performed exploratory data analysis (EDA) using Python and its frameworks, Matplotlib, Pandas, and GeoPandas.
The summary of my findings is as follows:
- The number of background checks is trending upward, and it has increased almost every year for the past two decades.
- The number of background checks is higher in March and December. There appear to be more firearm sales in the first and fourth quarters of the year.
- Most background checks are for handgun and long gun purchases.
- A considerably higher number of background checks are done in Kentucky, Illinois, Texas, and California. The number is exceptionally high in Kentucky, considering the population.
Code
My code can be found here:
Dataset
The dataset is from the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). It contains the number of FBI NICS firearm background checks by month, state, and type since November 1998.
The FBI provides the dataset in PDF. Jeremy Singer-Vine at BuzzFeed News has developed a parser to convert the PDF to CSV and made it available at https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/nics-firearm-background-checks.
Data Visualization
Number of Checks by Year
Number of Checks by Year
Number of Checks by Month in Recent Years
Number of Checks in Recent Years
Number of Checks by Type
Number of Checks by Type
Number of Checks by Month by Type
Number of Checks by Month by Type
Number of Checks by State
Number of Checks by State
Top 10 and Bottom 10 States by Number of Checks
Top 10 and Bottom 10 States by Number of Checks