From C. Chan, the author of the chart:

Christine Chan @ChristineHHChan
Follow

@kfury Thanks for raising this, I appreciate the feedback. Agree that the inverted y can be confusing & perhaps too misleading in this case.

Perhaps! Opinions differ! Teach the controversy.

And one billion facepalms were born...

^ Perfect.

Gun nuts are the worst people on earth. The circle gets tighter and tighter. Every day, every shooting, another gun nut asshole goes out and buys another weapon while another normal person looks at his firearm and wonders just how safe it's making him, and decides to get rid of it. Soon, while the total number of firearms will continue to skyrocket, the number of people owning them will be a tiny fraction, and owning a gun will be the kind of thing you don't admit in company, like hating black people or molesting children.

Holy fuck, how would a reputable news organization ever even consider publishing that graph?!? Insanity!

@3…I would say for the archipelago of sanity (urban/progressive America) admitting you own a handgun is already gasp invoking for the burgherdom.

And, that chart, truly Orwellian…the only reason to use such an inverted format would be to convey the exact opposite of reality.

I thought it was trying to convey dripping blood.

@4 - What the hell is a "reputable news organization"? I know those words individually, but that phrase makes no sense whatsoever.

A billion facepalms indeed...unreal.

I think the propagandists who pull this stuff - Faux with the misleading D/R tags - don't really expect to get away with it, in so far as their opponents are concerned - they know they'll get called out and have to issue a 'correction' - they're just counting on the depressing reality that most people aren't careful or particularly literate readers/watchers and will absorb the big lie subconsciously and never hear the correction.

Maybe I'm underestimating everyone's stupidity, but this doesn't seem all that confusing.

Coming from a public agency,t his type of thing ought to be illegal on some level. A deputy commissioner somewhere should be losing their stripes.

Wut?

Oh... Florida.

What @7 said -- when I saw this, I thought they were trying to make some sort of cutesy visual analogy to dripping blood, and had failed to realize that they'd completely blown up the graph's ability to actually convey information in the process.

You can make it look like dripping blood without inverting the y-axis.

Here's that quote again:

Agree that the inverted y can be confusing & perhaps too misleading in this case.

It doesn't say, "perhaps misleading". She's allowing that it's maybe too misleading.

Reuters wants to mislead you with their graphs, but only up to a point. They don't want to jump the shark. Misleading, but not too misleading. They're professionals, after all. And if you go Full LaPierre people will suspect.

#3
"Gun nuts are the worst people on earth".
I like how you refrain from making hyperbolic generalizations and instead stick to making rational, well-researched assertions.
True story: post-Project launch drinkathon at a brewery in Seattle in fall of 2013. These are people who work for a big name non-profit in the Health Insurance space, a more lefty, kumbaya, Obama-stickered-Subaru crowd you could not meet.
As the cocktails flowed, half the table that I was sitting at, gradually revealed themselves as firearms owner oops sorry "gun nuts".
Pistols, Rifles, shoguns, you name it, and as a crowd they smash every ignorant stereotype that abject clowns like you like to throw out.
In fact, now I think carefully about it, not a single gun-owner that I came across that evening was an old white male. And aside from these folks, I already knew that half of IT were firearms owners from help desk grunts up to director level. All this, not at Boeing in Everett, but at a sensi-poo Seattle Healthcare not-for-profit.
Yes we may be discreet about our guns, but that's also just plain common sense. These are regulated items worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars. I wouldn't divulge that information unless it was someone I trusted not to rip me off or go blabbing about it to those who would.
Realize that we are everywhere, and I've no doubt there's one or two co-workers of yours at Solid Ground that are "gun-nuts", but you just don't know it yet.
I surmise that they know you well enough that they've probably refrained from revealing themselves to save your sissy ass going Code Brown
I'm sure they're also "the worst people on earth" and long may they remains so.
Have a nice day asshole.

Why the hell would anyone invert a Y axis?

I laughed out loud.