Introduction

Different media outlets use different definitions for the term “mass shooting”. In general, mass shootings are incidents involving several victims of firearm-related violence. These tragedies are influenced by multiple complex factors, many of which are still poorly understood. However, the public and media typically assume that the perpetrator has a mental illness and that the mental illness is the cause of these highly violent acts of horrific desperation.

There are many factors that causes such massacre and some of the major factors include:

The following visualisations aim to explore the factors leading to these massacres in the United States. The analysis is based on data on US Mass Shootings provided by Mother Jones and it covers in-depth of the mass shootings cases from 1982 to February 2020.


Source: El-Affendi, A.(2019)


Top 5 Mass Shootings in America

The plot below shows the top five mass shooting incidents in the United States over the past 38 years. It shows that the incident from the Las Vegas Massacre that occured in 2017 resulted in the highest number of fatalities at 58 deaths which is considered to be the dealiest massacre in US history.

The incident happened where on October 1, 2017 where a 64 Year Old white male shot killed and injured, 58 and 546 people, respectively.

Annual Mass Shooting Casualties

The plot below shows the annual number of number of victims and fatalities through these massacre from 1982-2020.

We can see the number of fatalies has increased along the years with an exceptionally large number of total victims in 2017 due to the Las Vegas Strip Massacre.

Total Victims by State

The following choropleth map shows the breakdown of the Total Victims in each state from 1982 to 2020. The number of Fatalities, Injured and Total Victims can been observed by hovering of each region.

Nevada (i.e. NV) has the highest number of victims which is largely due to the incident happened at Las Vegas Strip as mentioned in the previous slide. However, the largest number of incidents occured in California (i.e. CA) with a total of 20 shootings since 1982, followed by Florida (i.e. FL) with 12 incidents.

Gun Ownership in the World

The ownership rate of guns in the United States is at an average of 88.8 per 100 people. That puts USA as the first in the world for gun ownership.

It is said that one of the factors resulting in mass shooting incidents is due to the high number of gun ownership.

Illegally Attained Firearms

In the last 38 years, more than half the incidents (70%), shooters were using illegally obtained firearms. The figure below shows the Mass Shooting throughout the years and how it is tied to the shooters what commit these massacres with illegally attained firearms and according to the data, the most deadliest mass shootings in US (i.e. Las Vegas Strip Massacre), shooter was found to be in possession of illegal firearms.

Based on this trend, weapons attained illegally has been slowly increasing from 1982-2018 with its peak at 2018.

Shooters by Age

Based on the distribution shown below, the age of most mass killers are between the age of 20-50 years old.

Most mass shooter were in their 20s and from the data, the youngest shooter is at the age of 11. The incident happened in 1998 at Westside Middle School where the shooter shot 4 students and a teacher with multiple weapons. The oldest shooter in the data was 66 years of age where the perpetrator shot and killed 5 people while injuring 4 people.

Shooters with Prior Mental Issues

The plot shows the mass shooting throughout the years and its ties to the perpetrators with prior mental health issues. The highest number of shootings that were linked to shooters who were known to have prior mental issue are found to be in 2012.

We can see that shooters with prior mental issues are factors which caused such massacres.

Conclusion

The choropleth map below shows the mass shootings by state in 2020. Based on the data, there are more than 500 incidents that happened since January 1st with a total number of 2670 Victims. Amongst these numbers are 434 dead victims which adds on to the number victims for 2020.

In summary, even with the highest number of ownership rate in the world, United States is still not considered as the worst mass shooting rate. We have found shooters that commit such mass muders are mostly using illegally attained weapons (70%). Although attaining illegal weapon may be a large factors for the massacres in the United States, there is also a majorty of shooters (55%) that is found to have prior mental issues.

Some possible actions can be taken as follows:

Reference