Mass Shootings Are Horrifying Enough Without Fudging The Numbers by Bob Rudis (@hrbrmstr).
From the post:
Business Insider has a piece titled “We are now averaging more than one mass shooting per day in 2015”, with a lead paragraph of:
As of August 26th, the US has had 247 mass shootings in the 238 days of 2015.
They go on to say that the data they used in their analysis comes from the Mass Shootings Tracker. That site lists 249 incidents of mass shootings from January 1st to January 28th.
The problem is you can’t just use simple, inflammatory math to make the point about the shootings. A shooting did not occur every day. In fact, there were only 149 days with shootings. Let’s take a look at the data.
We’ll first verify that we are working with the same data that’s on the web site by actually grabbing the data from the web site:
…
Complete with R code and graphs to show days with multiple mass shootings on one day.
Be mindful that the Mass Shooting Tracker counts four (4) or more people being shot as a mass shooting. Under earlier definitions four (4) or more people had to be murdered for it to be a mass shooting.
BTW, there were ninety-one (91) days with no mass shootings this year. (so far)