Comparison of firearm deaths from the forensic medicine service with what was published in digital media during 2022

Abstract

Honduras has a unique situation regarding violence-related deaths, especially those caused by firearms. The data used in this article comes from the Forensic Medicine Service and Mobile Morgue of the Public Ministry in Honduras and from scraping results from the Duckduckgo search engine accessed through the application programming interface (API). The data taken is just from 2022; in the case of search parameters, we only took the results of Honduran digital media sites filtered using the keyword "balazo". We wanted to measure if there was a difference between the number of deaths from firearms officially reported by the Public Ministry when comparing them with those published in Honduran digital media obtained through web scraping during the year of study. This study followed a typical descriptive design by determining the sample variables' frequencies, distributions, and qualitative characteristics. The results show that the number of deaths from firearms reported by digital media is higher than the official number. Using the number of deaths per thousand inhabitants, the tabloids, when they refer to less populated regions, the differences compared to the values published by the Public Ministry turn out to be up to twenty times greater; as far as urban centers are concerned, it is reduced to the level that digital media report up to twice as many deaths per thousand inhabitants. Keywords: Firearms deaths; digital media; sensationalism; scraping; text analysis; forensic science