America's Gun Problem: How Frequently Do Mass Shootings Occur?

The terrorist attacks by ISIS are despicable, cowardly, sad. I can’t even begin to fathom what would make one human want to kill another. Needless to say, a solution is needed, and it won’t be easy.

But as I was checking on my friends in Paris, a question popped into my head: How often do the biggest of mass shootings occur in the United States? With that question in mind, I started by exploring the data with Vizable and shared the results on Twitter.


I knew there was a story to be told; I also wanted the people interacting with the story to create their own definition of mass shooting. So I opened the data in Tableau and started answering the question myself. I had a few goals:

1. Show all of the days when people were shot
2. Allow the user to create their own definition of mass shooting (I chose 10)
3. Highlight the days that “qualified” as mass shootings
4. Show the cyclical nature of shootings

To me, looking at the data this way shows the staggering numbers of shootings in the US.