asamoahkwadwosomuah-hash/gun-violence

National security data analysis tracking Ghana's gun violence trends (Q1–Q2 2025) using official NACSA incident reports — regional, severity, and demographic patterns. Python, pandas, matplotlib. # Ghana Gun Violence Trends: A National Security Data Analysis **A national security data analysis project — Python, pandas, matplotlib — tracking Ghana's rising gun violence using official government incident reports.** ## Background Gun violence has emerged as a fast-growing security concern in Ghana, driven by a mix of armed robbery, chieftaincy and land disputes, and the proliferation of illegally held and trafficked firearms. Ghana's **National Commission on Small Arms and Light Weapons (NACSA)** — a statutory body established by Parliament in 2007 — publishes quarterly "Open-Source Gun Incidence" (OGI) reports tracking these trends. This project analyzes the first two published quarters of 2025 to understand the scale, geography, and severity of the trend. ## A critical methodology caveat **This dataset is explicitly "open-source"** — NACSA compiles it from publicly reported and media-covered incidents, not a comprehensive census of every gun-related incident recorded by every police station in Ghana. This almost certainly **undercounts** the true number of incidents, and likely skews toward incidents that attracted media attention (e.g., higher-casualty or urban events). This data is useful for tracking **trend direction and relative regional/demographic patterns**, not as a precise absolute count of all gun violence in the country. NACSA's own reports state this limitation, and this project treats it as a first-order caveat, not a footnote. ## A note on a related, separate, and disputed incident On January 19, 2025, a fatal confrontation occurred at the AngloGold Ashanti mine in Obuasi (Ashanti Region) between Ghanaian soldiers and small-scale miners. **The facts of this specific incident are disputed between sources** and are not included in this project's quantitative dataset, since it falls outside the NACSA OGI reporting window and its casualty count is contested: the Ghana Armed Forces stated 7 illegal miners were killed in a firefight after mine …