This dataset documents the number of NICS background checks. I've truncated the total number of rows to one years worth of checks to reduce the size. I've also reduced the number of columns to only the data that is interesting to me and is easy to describe.

The attributes are as follows:

month: month and year of number of checks: DATE (I am importing as a sting because the parseDate function is not working for me. I know this means I'm doing something wrong but I haven't been able to figure out how to make it work for me.)

state: US state (or territory) of the NICS background check: CATEGORICAL

handgun: quantity of handgun background checks: quantitative

long-gun: quantity of long gun background checks: quantitatve

other: quatity of other background checks, most likely NFA items such as silencers, machine guns, etc: quantitative

multiple: quantity of background checks for multiple sales: quantitative

The NICS dataset can be found here: https://github.com/BuzzFeedNews/nics-firearm-background-checs