America by the Numbers (nytimes.com)

Statistics can be valuable for companies, and they're not very expensive to obtain. For example if you're considering building a Java IDE you want to know how many professional Java programmers there are.

In a reddit Ask Me Anything post a TSA screener mentioned how his area alone found 1-2 guns a month and a few knives/screwdrivers a day.

I had my spyderco folding knife confiscated. I totally forgot it was in my backpack. Apparently that happens alot.

so what is a gun? maybe a lot of those were toy guns (definitely not allowed on a plane).

My long-running objection to this kind of quicky journalism exactly. No detailed attribution, no drill-down availability, no footnotes. I developed facster.com to overcome these and other limitations, the goal being to provide research-quality stats from the government and other sources, make the information searchable, browseable, and joinable. I haven't had the time to do much work on it since 2005, so the most recent abstract I loaded is from 2003. Also in some migration the search index got damaged. A lot of search terms are missing, but I've boosted repairing the search index on my to do list.

In addition the data isn't normalized. The rate of something could be decreasing year-over-year but due to population increase the quantity continues to increase. Ignoring the normalized data helps journalists create sensationalistic headlines.

As "journalism" I find it lacking, but it might be fun to write a web widget that would put one stat delta per day.

That figure sounds insanely high. Can anyone confirm it?

It didn't say in jail, it said 7.3 millions incarcerated or on probation or parole, which is fairly significantly different.

Most recent statistic I could find (on Wikipedia, I did not drill down to their source) was about 0.75% actually incarcerated. (2.4 million people)