This post is not about finance or law, but about mass shootings.
Mass Shooting: “FOUR or more shot and/or killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location not including the shooter.” (Source: GVA)
Roseburg, Oregon
October 1, 2015, marks another incident of mass shooting in the United States. This time, it was Christopher Sean Harper-Mercer, a student at Umpqua Community College who killed 9 people after asking them if they were Christians. The police found 13 firearms connected to the shooter, all legally obtained via a federally licensed arms dealer.
Mass Shootings in the U.S.
The Gun Violence Archive (GVA) is an online, not for profit organization that uses third-party sources to produce gun violence statistics. The organization provides public access to a part of their dataset, including mass shootings between November 21, 2014 and October 2, 2015. GVA defines mass shooting as “FOUR or more shot and/or killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location not including the shooter.” Using Python, PANDAS and Matplotlib, analyzing the numbers of casualties (persons killed or injured) is straightforward.
Aggregated mass shooting statistics
![Mass Shootings](http://www.melvintjonakon.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/stacked.png)
California, New York and Illinois top the list of total casualties per state. Looking at the total number of casualties per month during this period shows an unsettling, rising trend:
![Total number of mass shootings casualties per month](http://www.melvintjonakon.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/trend.png)
Finally, there is a significant difference between the number of casualties per individual incident (medians: 1 fatality, 4 injured) and the average number of casualties per state, indicating the existence of incidents with many casualties. The Oregon shooting of Thursday is one example:
![](http://www.melvintjonakon.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/averages1.png)