Cross-posted with the Global Data Desk.

As the destruction of the long gun registry looms, federal and Ontario cabinet ministers are in a tug-of-war over the province’s plan to require gun dealers to keep records of who buys firearms.

Before legislation to abolish the registry was passed, Global News obtained postal code data for firearms owners from the RCMP using access-to-information laws. The maps below paint a picture of the geography of gun culture in Ontario.

The province-wide map shows low gun ownership rates in urban and suburban areas (Ottawa, the GTA, Hamilton-Niagara), higher rates in surrounding rural areas, and the highest ones, roughly, north of where viable farmland gives out.

A map showing only Toronto (scroll down to the bottom of the page) shows almost no gun licence holders downtown and the north half of Scarborough, and concentrations of gun owners – by Toronto standards – in Downsview and southern Etobicoke.

(Cross-posted earlier at the Global Data Desk)

Longtime Progressive Conservative MPP Elizabeth Witmer is resigning as MPP for Kitchener-Waterloo, leaving the door open to a snap byelection which could shift the balance of power at Queen’s Park.

In the October 6, 2011 election, Witmer won the seat with 43.4 per cent of the vote, defeating her Liberal opponent by about 7 per cent.

Our map shows the poll-by-poll results for the riding in the 2011 provincial election. Use the dropdown menu to see the PC, NDP, Green or Liberal votes in isolation.

In 2011, the PCs took the riding with the suburban outskirts of Waterloo, while the Liberals held a solid block of polls in the city centre. The NDP won in a few polls in the south of the riding. Click on the image to see the full interactive.

I’ve always found bike accident data challenging to work with. The data itself isn’t hard to come by, but it can be difficult to see what to do with it. Motorists and pedestrians are systematically counted by intersection, but not cyclists (except for the annual cordon counts, which only look at cyclists entering the downtown core at designated intersections on a single day.) Cycling is so dependent on weather and season that it’s hard to see how a count would happen, unless the City somehow managed to count at hundreds of intersections at the same time.

If you just map the accidents, you end up more or less replicating bike traffic patterns – some parts of the city are more bikeable than others, and a certain percentage of cyclists will get into trouble. But is the map a guide to dangerousness? It’s hard to tell without the traffic levels to establish a ratio.

(You can total accidents by intersection. A number of years ago now I made a fool of myself by adding up the accidents and declaring Harbord and Spadina the worst intersection for cyclists in Toronto; I think King and Bathurst was the worst one for pedestrians, using the same logic. I like to think we’ve moved on and become wiser, but I offer it as a cautionary tale.)

OpenFile resourcefully came at the problem from another angle with their bike route planner, which launched this morning for six cities: for a given bike route (the site is wired into Google’s route planner), what is the accident history of the route (going back for years, with lots of detail)? What are the most accident-prone intersections? It’s a very ambitious project.

There’s a lively discussion of the maps on Twitter.