The firearms export project began in May 2021 as part of a Drew University Digital Humanities Summer Institute project to visualize the specific commercial pathways and relative sizes of US gun exports to other countries. With information from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the US International Trade Commission, we identified the locations of major firearms manufacturers, the major export markets for each company, the types of firearms exported, and dollar value of exports.
Our work was published by Data in Brief, and the associated data sets are available to download from Mendeley Data.
Jordan, L, Elessaway, E, Munro-Ludder, G (2022) Geographical dataset of firearms manufacturing in the United States: 2000-2020. Data in Brief 22(45). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dib.2022.108626
This work was recently recognized in an article in The Economist, with our numbers also cited by The Trace.
Our work built on previous Digital Humanities scholarship, explored in 2018. That work was also published, with data sets available on Harvard Dataverse.
Jordan, L, Kalin, J, Dabrowski, D (2020) Characteristics of Gun Advertisements on Social Media: Systematic Search and Content Analysis of Twitter and YouTube Posts. J Med Internet Res. 22(3). https://www.jmir.org/2020/3/e15736/
That work was recognized in a follow up, and ongoing study by ProPublica.
