A couple of hours ago, I was telling a colleague of mine how good this Periscopic graphic about gun deaths is over beer. If you haven’t seen it, you should check it out right now. The way that the dots (people) just drop off of their potential lifespans, and how, once the animation gets up to full speed, the whole thing looks like a machine gun firing…it’s super affecting.
But I’m starting to question the editorial judgement a little bit. I took another look at the graphic tonight after finding it to share the link with my colleague. I hadn’t actually realized that you can click on any one of those lines—which, of course, represent real individuals—and be taken to the news story about the corresponding person’s death.
After filtering out all but the deaths in the past seven days, I found and clicked on one that had taken place in my own borough of Brooklyn. Apparently, the victim had stabbed somebody, and then lunged with his knife at the cops who arrived on the scene. The cops ended up shooting and killing him.
I’m not sure that including gun deaths like this one in the graphic was a sound decision. Clearly the graphic was intended to inform the debate about gun regulation in the US. It was published when Sandy Hook was very fresh in everyone’s mind and Wayne LaPierre was on TV almost every day.
So, in addition to tacitly arguing for tighter gun control, is it also arguing that police officers shouldn’t have guns? And, is it really fair to say that someone who gets shot after threatening a group of cops with a knife has had his life stolen from him? He played some role in his demise, no?
Obviously, I have no idea what actually happened that night. The cops could have been trigger-happy or bigoted or just a bunch of dumbasses. Maybe they did fire without cause and maybe they did steal a life. I’m not sure.
But the point is that Periscopic isn’t either. They made the decision to include all gun deaths and to declare the consequent lost years of the victim “stolen” regardless of who fired the gun and whether or not it was self-defense.
And I understand—there are a lot of gun deaths in this country, unfortunately, and going through every individual death probably isn’t all that feasible for the Periscopic team.
But if you’re going to take on a project this ambitious and important, I think that you should do your best not to be misleading. A simple way to do that would be to not include cases where a cop was the shooter. Surely, police officers have caused a slew of unnecessary gun deaths. But save that injustice for a different graphic.