Although the majority of people in the United States are currently focused on the Coronavirus pandemic that is currently affecting the nation, the fact remains that there is also another epidemic that has been quietly affecting the nation far longer that has not received nearly as much press coverage, gun violence. Gun violence is usually brought to attention by the media as the result of a mass shooting incident in a public location resulting in multiple victims.
Mother Jones has created a database compiling mass shooting incidents from 1982 to present, but for purposes of this exploration a subset of this database will be used spanning 1999 to 2019, which includes 91 mass shooting incidents all of which are plotted on the incident map below. It is worth noting that Mother Jones defines a "mass shooting" as "a single attack in a public place in which four or more victims were killed." If this definition were different, it would affect the number of mass shooting incidents during this time period.
From the incident map, we can see that California has the largest number of mass shooting incidents during this time period with a total of 14 mass shootings. Texas and Florida both have the second highest number of mass shooting incidents with a total of 8 mass shootings during this time period.
Let's break this map down to look at the types of mass shootings. When analyzing this visual, keep in mind that the size of the square is in relation to the total number of victims attributed by the type of shooting.
While "concerts" may have the highest total victim count, "concerts" is only representative of two mass shootings. The "Las Vegas Strip massacre", a "concert" type of shooting, had a total of 604 victims, which is why "concerts" has the most total victims. Barring "other" types of mass shootings, "workplace" type mass shootings is representative of the highest number of mass shootings with 27 shootings, but has fewer total victims than "school" mass shootings, which has only 12 shootings.
Temporal Trends
Now that we have looked at geographic trends in mass shootings, lets look at temporal trends in mass shootings.
As we can see, the first decade, 1999 to 2009, had fewer mass shooting incidents than in the second decade, 2010 to 2019. The first decade only had 25 mass shooting incidents while the second decade had 66 mass shooting incidents, that is a 164% increase in mass shootings.
Individual Cases
Shown below is each mass shooting measured and organized by total victim count. As we can see, the "Las Vegas Strip massacre" has the highest total victim count by far followed by the "Orlando nightclub massacre" and the "Aurora theater shooting".
Shifting gears, let's get to the main point of this exploration. Although I wanted to focus on the victims of these shootings, with this database it was not possible to do so as the only information provided on the victims was how many were injured or killed. Finding information on the victims through some alternative means is not entirely possible as some victims do not want to be publically identified so we are left to analyze the shooters rather than the victims.
Shooter Demographics
As this database does provide information on the shooter's race and gender, it makes sense to conduct an analysis to determine the predominant race and gender of mass shooters. Due to the Black Lives Matter protests earlier this year, I believe that a racial analysis could provide some insight into mass shootings as many people would expect the race of the mass shooter to be Black, which is an example of the type of racial bias that these protests are trying to address. To this end, the visual analyzing shooter's race only includes three categories; Black, White, and Other (inclusive of the races Asian, Latino, Native American, and Other) to show the difference in the amount of Black and White shooters to determine if the racial bias of mass shooters being Black is true.
When analyzing this visual, keep in mind that each square represents 1% out of 100%.
From the racial analysis, we can see that the predominant race of mass shooters is White with 55% or 49 of the mass shooting incidents being committed by White people as compared to 16% or 15 of the mass shootings committed by Black people and 30% or 27 of the mass shootings committed by the rest of the other races. This shows that the racial bias is indeed wrong, however, if we were evaluating gun violence as a whole this conclusion might shift. From the gender analysis, right away it is made obvious that the predominant gender of mass shooters is Male with 94% or 86 of the mass shooting incidents being committed by Males as compared to 3% or 3 of the mass shootings committed by Females and 3% or 2 of the mass shootings committed by a Male and Female duo.
Conclusions
Although we were unable to focus on the victims of the mass shootings, we were able to learn more about the shootings and about the shooters themselves. Through this exploration we were able to determine that the most common type of shooting is "workplace" shootings, the predominant race of mass shooters is White, and the predominant gender of mass shooters is Male. We were also able to learn that mass shootings have increased over the years and some states seem to have more incidents of mass shootings than others and if I had the time and resources to do so it may be worth looking into why this is the case.
