Mother Jones, Slate open up a couple stunning datasets related to gun violence

Published 2012-12-29

In the wake of mass shootings this year, and the journalism that followed, Mother Jones has opened up a dataset of mass shootings in the U.S. between 1982 and 2012. Included are a spreadsheet of the incidents, and a spreadsheet of the weapons used. You can read more about it here.

Meanwhile, Slate has partnered with the Twitter account @GunDeaths to create "an interactive, crowdsourced tally of the toll firearms have taken since Dec. 14" -- the date of the mass shooting in Newtown, Conn. that left 26 dead.

Of course, this data is incomplete. Not all reports get caught by @GunDeaths’ news alerts or his followers. Suicides, which are estimated to make up as much as 60 percent of gun deaths, typically go unreported. Nevertheless, we at Slate want to assemble this data as best we can.

Slate too has opened up the data and made it available for download.