US Vietnam War Casualties by state data can be misleading

The data set is available on Kaggle.
The code used to analyse the data is available here.

Data can and is used and abused by people with agendas - for example politicians. Let's say for some reason I want to convince you that CA made a greater sacrifice during the Vietnam war than any other state. The raw data backs up this claim but doesn't take into account CA's population size compared to other states.

​Plotting the number of casualties by state gives:

This is a little misleading, because CA, TX and so on are large populous states so it is not surprising that the greatest number of casualties came from these states. I added in state populations from 1967 and calculated the casualty rates per capita per state, then plotted the data again:

This map suggests Missouri had a disproportionately large casualty rate normalised by state population compared to other states while California had a relatively low casualty rate.

Don't let the politicians, media or corporations use data to trick you.