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.

Another mass shooting in the USA. 17 more people shot. 10 dead. 7 wounded.

So what’s one to do? How about find some data and see if a visualisation can have an impact?

This morning, I woke up early thinking about the data. I didn’t want data about murders; I wanted data about shootings. Why? Because if shootings don’t occur, then gun murders can’t occur.

A Google search turned up the amazing website Mass Shooting Tracker. They’ve been collecting data about mass shootings since 2013. Their explanation of what and why they track what they do is critical:

The most obscene incidents of gun violence usually do not make the mainstream news at all. Why? Because their definition is incorrect. The mainstream news meaning of "Mass Shooting" should more accurately be described as "Mass Murder".
The old FBI definition of Mass Murder (not even the most recent one) is four or more people murdered in one event. It is only logical that a Mass Shooting is four or more people shot in one event.
Here at the Mass Shooting Tracker, we count the number of people shot rather than the number people killed because, "shooting" means "people shot".

I downloaded all of the data, parsed out the locations, loaded them into Batch Geocoding and viola…all the data I needed to build this viz.