The many guns of urban America

God and guns keep us strong
That's what this country was founded on
Well we might as well give up and run
If we let them take our God and guns
-Lynyrd Skynyrd, "God and Guns"

As we have shown in earlier maps (here and here) guns have become a central fixture of the American landscape.

And often proponents of the Second Amendment are associated with a predominantly rural, religious and conservative population as exemplified by the above song lyric. Whether or not this is because rural Americans are 'bitter', the stereotype remains pervasive. However, when we map the number of user-generated Google Maps placemarks mentioning the word "gun", a much different pattern emerges.

Absolute Number of Guns in User-Generated Placemarks

Although the smaller dots peppered throughout the rural United States certainly show that guns maintain a presence in the rural landscape, the highest concentrations of guns in user-generated placemarks are undoubtedly found in the nation's urban centers.

Relative Specialization in Guns in User-Generated Placemarks

By focusing instead on those places with a higher-than-average number of placemarks with the word "gun", the concentration in urban areas becomes more obvious - rural areas are all but wiped off the map of indexed values. A plausible explanation would simply say that the prevalence of guns is more a function of population (more references to guns because there are more people) than of a stylized cultural trait.

Or could the differences in user-generated content been explained, at least in part, by a digital divide between urban and rural Americans? For example, rural Americans could simply be too busy actually using their guns to worry about adding user-generated placemarks to Google Maps? We should also note that the meaning of a reference to the word "gun" in a placemark is not straightforward. In other words, it could be a protest against guns or, alternatively, an affirmation of them.

Unfortunately, we end with an entirely new set of questions and are left clinging to conjecture, just as much of America remains clinging to their guns.

Informal versus OFFICIAL Fun & Vacation

In some of our previous explorations of user-generated representations of place, we looked at the "funnest" places in North America. Although Toronto was by far the "funnest", when normalized by population, Cape Cod Bay looked like the best place to go for a good time (because, you know, nobody actually lives in the bay). In order to get a better grasp on where the fun is and from whence it comes, we compared our previous data on user-generated Google Maps placemarks mentioning the word "fun" with listings in the Google Maps directory that mentioned "fun". In short, how do informal notions of fun (user-generated) compare to OFFICIAL fun (directory listings).

Locations of Informal (user-generated) and Official (directory listing) Fun

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Toronto again appears prominent because of the prevalence of informal, as opposed to official, "fun". Toronto is largely an anomaly among urban areas in North America as most cities are decidedly tilted towards fun of the official type variety. Clearly we need to do some fieldwork in Toronto!

Likewise a considerable area in the rural western U.S. also displays a favoritism towards user-generated/informal fun. Upon further examination, many of the areas displayed in orange above correlate to the locations of US National Parks and National Forests. Because there would be few, if any, directory listings in these protected areas (as opposed to urban areas, which would have a much larger directory), user-generated placemarks are more prevalent than those generated automatically using sources like the Yellow Pages.

Also of interest is the high correlation in the differences between user-generated and directory content for "fun" and the differences between user-generated and directory content for "vacation" (see below). Here again wide swaths of the western US have more user-generated vacation reference than directory content, despite the general trend across the U.S. and Canada being the opposite. One site that shows up prominently as a cluster for user generated fun and vacation is Wall, South Dakota, home to the famous Wall Drug. Many a weary traveler driving across the country on I-90 have sought a few hours of refugee/distraction here. And apparently many have chosen to document it as well.

Locations of Informal (user-generated) and Official (directory listing) Vacation

So even if only in the relative prevalence of user-generated representations of places that are both fun and good for vacationing (don't they go so well together?), rural areas have found their place in the American cyberscape.