Student Project

W209 Data Visualization: Mass Shootings in America

Data Visualization: Mass Shootings in America

W209 Data Visualization Final Project
Adam Letcher, Jessica Vincent, Michael Powers

About the Data 

The visualizations in our project are based primarily on the Mother Jones open-source database that documents mass shootings in the United States from 1982-present. The database was started in 2012, in the aftermath of the movie theater massacre in Aurora, Colorado. It captures many attributes of mass shooting events, including number of victims, venue, location, gun type, gun status, race of perpetrator, mental health status of perpetrator, etc. Our team conducted additional research on the mass shooting events in the database to add supplementary columns (age, criminal history, etc.), and also joined the Mother Jones data with gun regulation data from the Washington Post.

Data Sources

Mother Jones Mass Shooting Index*: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/mass-shootings-mother-jones-full-data/

Washington Post Gun Regulation: https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2017/national/assault-weapons-laws/?utm_term=.f9b7ffa2d66e

*Our team added additional columns based on additional research to the Mother Jones Mass Shooting dataset. Our expanded dataset is available in the git repo. 

Mass Shooting Definition

The FBI and criminologists previously defined a mass shooting as a single attack in a public place in which four or more victims were killed. In January 2013, a mandate for federal investigation of mass shootings authorized by President Barack Obama lowered that baseline to three or more victims killed. Therefore, the dataset includes incidents with 4 or more fatalities prior to 2013, and incidents with 3 or more fatalities from 2013-present.

Visualization

The visualizations are currently hosted in a Tableau Desktop workbook with a connection to the data files saved in this repo. In future iterations of the visualization, we may migrate the visualization to a web hosted location that does not require Tableau software. In the meantime, those without a Tableau Desktop license should be able to view the visualization with Tableau Reader, available for free.

Last updated:

October 1, 2019