For the past 13 months, the Coronavirus pandemic has caused Americans to simply want life to return to normal; back to work, back to school, and back to social gatherings without risk of infection. As federal and state restrictions begin to loosen, there may be a decreased risk of the COVID-19 virus, but evidently gatherings promote potential mass shootings (Holcombe, 2021).

Since the 1920s, the United States has seen fatalities from gun violence in schools, movie theatres, grocery stores, night clubs, and even more recently in a FedEx facility. The media reports new mass shootings at an alarming rate, with over 45 cases in the last month Furthermore, the United States has seen at least 147 mass shooting just in the first three months of this year (McLaughlin, 2021). Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe explained how there is no other “similar country on Earth that experiences the same number, the frequency of mass shootings as we do”. Although there is still no universal accepted definition of a mass shooting, the Congressional Research Service defines it as:

“a multiple homicide incident in which four or more victims are murdered with firearms—not including the offender(s)—within one event, and at least some of the murders occurred in a public location or locations in close geographical proximity…”(TVP, 2020).

On March 23, 2021, CNN published an article explaining how the mass shooting crisis has led to the headline “Seven Mass Shootings in Seven Days”). In fact, the article quoted data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that America had 14,414 homicides in 2019, which is roughly one every 36 minutes. Gun violence has caused fatalities in Georgia, California, Oregon, multiple locations in Texas, Philadelphia, and Colorado, all in the second week of March. Former United States President Barak Obama spoke about the issue mentioning that a “once-in-a-century pandemic cannot be the only thing that slows mass shootings in the country”. Though many motives for these horrific acts stem from poor mental health or anger, Obama extended scapegoats to disaffection and misogyny. Sandy Phillips, co-founder of a guide to aid survivors of gun violence known as Survivors Empowered, explained victims who suffer in silence because their case did not make the news headlines. Phillips, who lost her 24-year-old daughter to gun violence, urges press to cover every case, providing opportunity for every neighborhood to speak about the crisis in their community.

The Mother Jones dataset summarizes mass shootings from 1982 to present (as of April 15, 2021). It summarizes information about each case including date, location, the total number of victims (fatalities plus those injured), and the shooter(s) demographics (age, mental illness status, gender, and race) (Follman, 2021). The data excludes gun violence from conventional crimes such as armed robbery or gang activity. Although existing mental health can be difficult to identify, Mother Jones divides each case into yes, no, unclear, and TBD categories. Moreover, the dataset includes the weapon(s) used during the incident, as well as whether the mechanism was legal and how it was obtained. In class, we discussed how gun regulation varies at a state level, and how a higher gun ownership rate increases the overall homicide rate. Because the dataset pulls locations from the entire country, there are more likely to be mass shootings where guns are more accessible.

The bubble chart breaks down each case of mass shootings since 1982, size correlating to the total number of victims, and color differentiating the type of public location such as school or workplace. Below the bubble chart, the various icons correlate with the locations that the incidents took place including schools, workplaces, religious facilities, airports, military facilities, and other miscellaneous gatherings. The overwhelmingly large green bubble represents the Las Vegas massacre that killed 59 people and affected over 604 concertgoers in 2017.

In an event still known as the “worst mass shooting in modern American history”, 64- year-old Stephen Paddock fired a range of bullets from the 32nd floor of a Las Vegas hotel (Blankstein, 2017). An NBC article that was published only a few days after the event reported that 23 firearms were found inside Paddock’s hotel after he was believed to kill himself, and an additional 19 weapons were found in his home. The suspect’s brother, Eric Paddock, told NBC News that he was “dumbfounded” by the event because he was “just a guy” who “went to the hotels, gambled, and went to shows”. Although there was no official evidence of a mental health disorder, Steven Paddock had erratic behavior, as he made “several large gambling transactions” in the weeks leading up to the event, some of more than $30,000 per day. In 2012, he also bizarrely sued the Cosmopolitan Hotel for a “slip and fall”, damaging his legitimacy several years prior.

The number of tragic fatalities is represented in a density map that highlights the deadliest mass attacks including the Las Vegas massacre, as well as the 54 deaths in Orlando, Florida (Follman, 2021). The area chart then categorizes the attacks each year since 1982 by the race of the attacker. As shown in the chart, a disproportional amount of mass shooting suspects are white. In fact, it wasn’t until 1990 that a mass shooter was not white. Although the trends in the recent decades have included more Black and Asian attackers, all of the suspects in 2021 so far have been white.

Though there are many ways to approach analyzing such intense data, the density map, area chart, and packed bubble chart promote a well-rounded interpretation of the data’s demographics. However, no matter how the data is portrayed, there is no debate that the rapidly increasing mass shootings is alarming. There are many potential solutions that could be enforced that may help to control the number of firearms including the buyback system described in class, but little will change if we don’t, as a society, say enough is enough.

Works Cited:

Blankstein, A. (2017). 59 people killed, more than 500 hurt in Las Vegas Strip shooting. NBC News. https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/las-vegas-shooting/las-vegas-police-investigating-shootingmandalay-bay-n806461

Follman, M., Aronsen, G., & Pan, D. (2021). US mass shootings, 1982–2021: Data from Mother Jones’ investigation. Mother Jones. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/12/massshootings-mother-jones-full-data/

Holcombe, M. (2021). The US has reported at least 45 mass shootings in the last month. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/16/us/mass-shootings-45-one-month/index.html

McLaughlin, Eliott. (2021). Analysis: Mass shootings signal a dubious “back to normal” in America. CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/23/us/back-to-normal-us-mass-shootingsanalysis/index.html

TVP. (2020). Mass shooting statistics data. The Violence Project. https://www.theviolenceproject.org/methodology/