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It would be interesting to see gun ownership compared to how socialized of a healthcare system / social systems each country has in place (eg: how much money they spend, could take into account tax rate then, too)
It's worth noting that _both_ of the outliers on this chart are the direct responsibility of the US population.
I can't seem to get those charts to a scale that's readable
This is like the very definition of 'bad topic' for this site. Guaranteed to get people riled up, not germane to startups or hacking, very political in nature, and something where no one ever convinces anyone else anyway.
Yup, flagged it as well. Sure, it has a few lines of code and some nice looking graph, but the subject is just creating controversy.
This shouldn't be flagged because it could create controversy. The article is not at fault here. Immature postings replying to this article that aren't related to the topic, but to the data used in the example should be flagged instead.

Don't kill a technical article just because the sample data used might whip up feelings in countries where it's a political issue. Science shouldn't back up from things like that.

This post is about using publicly available data to inform public policy.

The author demonstrates how to use R to analyze the data, and he illustrates a "deeply interesting" correlation. (Causation is another question.)

Just because the topic is controversial does not mean that it is not "deeply interesting". From the HN welcome page:

    What does "deeply interesting" mean? It means stuff that teaches
    you about the world. A story about a robbery, for example,
    would probably not be deeply interesting. But if this robbery
    was a sign of some bigger, underlying trend, then perhaps
    it could be.
Source: http://ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html