Visual explainer on what an AR-15 does to the human body

This is necessarily uncomfortable to go through, but for The Washington Post, N. Kirkpatrick, Atthar Mirza, and Manuel Canales show the bodily damage caused by an AR-15 bullet versus a 9mm round.

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Mass shootings calendar

A shooting in Monterey Park, California on Lunar New Year’s eve left 11 people dead. It was the 33rd mass shooting in the United States — for the month. For The Washington Post, Júlia Ledur and Kate Rabinowitz show the regularity of such events over the past year.

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Active shooter endings

For The New York Times, Larry Buchanan and Lauren Leatherby used Sankey diagrams to show the endings from active shootings in the United States:

Most attacks captured in the data were already over before law enforcement arrived. People at the scene did intervene, sometimes shooting the attackers, but typically physically subduing them. But in about half of all cases, the attackers commited suicide or simply stopped shooting and fled.

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Children exposed to school shootings

The Washington Post maintains a database of school shootings (which is sad in itself that such a thing has to exist) to keep record of tragedy that the U.S. government does not track. They calculated the number of kids since Columbine who were exposed to such terrible events:

The Washington Post spent a year determining how many children have been affected by school shootings, beyond just those killed or injured. To do that, reporters attempted to identify every act of gunfire at a primary or secondary school during school hours since the Columbine High massacre on April 20, 1999. Using Nexis, news articles, open-source databases, law enforcement reports, information from school websites and calls to schools and police departments, The Post reviewed more than 1,000 alleged incidents but counted only those that happened on campuses immediately before, during or just after classes.

The events are terrible when they happen, and they go on to affect thousands of others for a lifetime — kids who were just going on with their daily activities.

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Download comprehensive police shootings data

Data for police shootings is usually the subset that only includes fatalities. Vice News made requests nationwide to get data on people who were shot but not killed by police. To accompany their story, Vice News made the data and code available for download:

Ultimately, we obtained some data from 47 departments — with 4,099 incidents in all. Departments in New York’s Suffolk and Nassau Counties didn’t provide us with any data. Maryland’s Montgomery County Police Department gave us only partial incident-level information and no total number of police shootings, so we excluded them from the analysis.

We put all this information together to analyze trends across the departments and to compare them with one another — the first time this has ever been done for both fatal and nonfatal shootings.

Get the data and look for yourself.

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Nine rounds a second sonified

The New York Times used sonification along with a dot plot to demonstrate the speed of gunfire in Las Vegas. They compared it to the shooting in Orlando and an automatic weapon.

It is possible that the Las Vegas gunman modified his gun to fire faster. This could include using a trigger crank, a mechanical add-on that is rotated like a music box handle and hits the trigger multiple times per second. Or, he may have had a bump fire stock, which uses the recoil of the rifle to fire quicker. Neither device is regulated by the National Firearms Act.

Uggh.

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Nearly impossible to predict mass shootings with current data

Predicting mass shooting

Even if there were a statistical model that predicted a mass shooter with 99 percent accuracy, that still leaves a lot of false positives. And when you’re dealing with individuals on a scale of millions, that’s a big deal. Brian Resnick and Javier Zarracina for Vox break down the simple math with a cartoon.

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Police violence incident data

Police violence

There isn't a complete government record for people killed by police, which is why efforts such as the Guardian's The Counted project exists. Mapping Police Violence is another source to look at, and they have a dataset for download for shootings from 2013 to present.

We believe the data represented on this site is the most comprehensive accounting of people killed by police since 2013. The most liberal estimates project the total number of people killed by police in the U.S. to be about 1,200-1,300 per year. And while there are undoubtedly police killings that are not included in our database, these estimates suggest that our database captures at least 90-98 percent of all police killings that have occurred since 2013. We hope these data will be used to provide greater transparency and accountability for police departments as part of the ongoing campaign to end police violence in our communities.

The data includes each victim's name, location, race, agency responsible, news source, and more.

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Mass shootings count – Depends on your definition

mass shootingsWith recent events, you've likely seen the articles and graphics that get into the number of mass shootings this year and further into the past. You might have noticed that the numbers seem to vary depending on where you look, and the difference likely stems from how "mass shooting" is defined by the author.

Kevin Schaul for the Washington Post provides a straightforward interactive that uses a shootings dataset from Reddit, but shows how the count quickly changes depending on how your definition.

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