I recently discovered the Capitol Words API and have had some fun playing around with it. One of the categories in the API allows you to search for the words spoken by the senators of each state in the USA, and I was interested in finding out the number of times the words “gun” were recorded on a state bill between January 2012 and December 2013.

As we can see, the most densely populated states of New York, California, Illinois and, to a lesser extent, Texas, mention the word “gun” the most often. It is in interesting (but not surprising) to note that the more Republican and pro-gun Midwestern states are conspicuously quiet about mentioning guns. We can also track the monthly occurence at which the word “gun” was mentioned in state bills between January 2012 and December 2013:

The sharp peak we observe across many states on April 2013 illustrates the national response and outrage that followed the tragic Boston marathon bombing and subsequent shootings. We can also see that the state of California shows some peaks in February, June and November 2013, which can be associated to the Christopher Dorner shooting, the June 7 Santa Monica shooting and the November 1 LAX shooting.

Finally, we can explore the underlying relationship between references to “education” in state bills and that of “gun” and “shooting”. Again, the obvious outliers are Connecticut, California and Illinois, which all refer to education an unordinary amount of times. Interestingly, if these three outliers were removed, we could argue that a decent linear fit (with positive coefficient) could be achieved between the number of times the word “education” is stated in a bill and that of “gun” and “shooting”. In that case, we could interpret this as education being mentioned as a result of gun crime and shooting (a causal analysis will be in order for future work, namely finding the average lag time between shooting events and the reaction of statesmen).

Relationship between the number of times the words “shooting” and “education” were mentioned in state bills between January 2012 and December 2013

Relationship between the number of times the words “gun” and “education” were mentioned in state bills between January 2012 and December 2013