The Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimates that by the year 2003, firearms will become the number one cause of product-related deaths in the U.S. (the leading cause is now motor vehicles). In this project, you will examine the distribution of deaths due to firearms. You will see striking differences in the data when you look at the differences in firearm-related deaths for males and females: Males are almost six times more likely to be killed by a firearm than are females.
Clearly, the rates are higher for males than for females, but the question posed in this project concerns the amount of variation in each population. In this project, you will estimate the standard deviation for each group and perform a test to determine whether there is a significant difference between the groups.
A more interesting question, which statistics alone cannot answer, is what do these statistics mean? In other words, what does the standard deviation tell you, in this context? Are there social or psychological reasons for one group to have a larger amount of variation?