Year-to-date Death Toll From Mass Shootings Staggering

A friend forwarded me a Washington Post graphic concerning the violence in Roseburg that was sourced from a website called shootingtracker.com.

The website aims to provide media outlets with shooting statistics to publicize the scourge of gun violence.

The data is publicly available for download and I did just that, creating the above map with Excel. The map reflects mass shootings this year as defined by a shooting incident involving three or more people. Red represents fatalities, blue injuries.

The number of incidents, fatalities, and injuries left me numb, as if I lacked a vocabulary to understand it. Having the data set helped in this regard as I ran it through a number of graphs.

In labeling this I forgot to add that these numbers only reflect mass shootings -- involving three people or more. This should not be confused with totals for all gun deaths or injuries.

Further depressing, the several hours that elapsed from when I downloaded the data to when I made the graphs saw a new place (Inglis, FL) and body count (1 dead, 3 injured) appear.

I hope to have a clearer plan of action as time goes on. This is completely outrageous that our communities are so prone to gun violence yet nothing coherent can be done about it.