Graph of the Day: School shootings in the United States, 1990 – Oct 2015
2 October 2015 (Desdemona Despair) – In early 21st-century America, death by random gun violence has become a background dread, a bit like fear of nuclear annihilation during the Cold War. U.S. schools have modern “duck-and-cover” training for kids in the form of active shooter drills.
Most Americans probably think that school shootings are getting worse, but are they really? Fortunately, there’s a Wikipedia page that tracks school shootings, so it’s a pretty easy matter to convert the Wikipedia tables into spreadsheets and graphs.
It’s pretty clear that school shootings really have been getting worse in recent years. The number of incidents took off in 2012 and (hopefully) peaked in 2014 – but there are still three months left in 2015. You can get the data and related graphs here: School shootings in the US.xlsx.
"The Gun is good! The Penis is evil! The Penis shoots Seeds, and makes new Life to poison the Earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the Gun shoots Death and purifies the Earth of the filth of Brutals. Go forth, and kill! Zardoz has spoken."