Mass shooting violence in the United States is an on-going problem that seems to get worse as time goes by. There has been many pushes for adequate gun control laws to try and limit access to semiautomatic weapons, which are the most common types of weapons that are used in mass shootings, but the problem still remains.
For this project, I will be using the “Mother Jones – Mass Shooting Database, 1982 to 2019” a database that was compiled by Mother Jones and is kept up to date to investigate mass shootings in the United States from 1999 to 2019. I was interested in determining if there are trends in the shooter’s gender and race as well as trends in the amount of shootings over time and the amount of victims over time.
The information garnered from these visualizations and this investigation overall could be used to used to show what types of places and locations are more prone to mass shooting violence so that those places could improve security and police presences. It could also be used to bring attention to mass shooting violence in the United States to create a push to [hopefully] stop this type of violence.
To start off my investigation, I created two timelines that each depict one decade of shooting violence to determine trends in mass shooting violence over time. The first timeline is from 1999 to 2009 and the second timeline is from 2010 to 2019. By comparing the two timelines, we can easily see that there was much more shooting violence in the second decade, and in recent years, than there was in the first. It is also important to note that in 2002 there was no mass shootings and was the only year where there were no mass shootings.
As a followup to the timeline, I wanted to analyze the number of mass shootings and the total number of victims over time. To do this I created two scatter plots and added trend lines to them. The first is a scatter plot of the number of shootings over time with a polynomial trend line with a power of three. It shows that as time increases so does the number of shootings. This trend is significant at the 1% level as the p-value of the trend line is less than 0.0001. The second is a scatter plot of the number of victims over time with a polynomial trend line with a power of three. It shows that as time increases so does the number of victims. This trend is significant at the 5% level as the p-value of the trend line is less than 0.05. It is important to note, there are no entity fixed effects in the regression analyses above. This could have affected the coefficients as well as affected the p-values and standard errors.
I then created a tree map to analyze the total amount of victims as a result of each instance of mass shooting violence. In doing so, I determined that the Las Vegas Strip massacre perpetrated by Stephen Paddock had the most victims by far. To round out the top three largest mass shooting cases, it was followed by the Orlando nightclub massacre perpetrated by Omar Mateen and the Aurora theater shooting perpetrated by James Holmes.
Next, I wanted to investigate the location types of mass shootings. To do this, I created a stacked bar chart which shows the total amount of victims as a result of that type of mass shooting. It shows that the most victims were a result of concert mass shootings followed by other types of mass shootings, school mass shootings, workplace mass shootings, nightclub mass shootings, religious mass shootings, military mass shootings, multiple (spree) mass shootings, and festival shootings. The concert location type had the most victims even though it only accounted for two shootings because of the Las Vegas Strip massacre.
Finally, I wanted to analyze the gender and race of the mass shooters. To do this, I created two visualizations, both of which were waffle grids. The first waffle grid was used to compare black mass shooters to white mass shooters. It was determined that white mass shooters were the dominant race of mass shooters as compared to black mass shooters and mass shooters of other races. The second waffle grid was used to compare male mass shooters to female mass shooters. It was determined that male mass shooters were the dominant gender of mass shooters as compared to female mass shooters and male and female duo mass shooters.
Given the time, I would have liked to take a closer look at a single category and do an in-depth analysis of just that category of mass shootings to determine if there were any trends in gender, race, total victims, amount of shootings, or any other trends that may have gotten overlooked in the overview of mass shootings that I have done in this instance.
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