The Wall Street Journal put together a nice piece about the uptick in elementary school shootings, both in the number of shootings and the number of deaths. It used two bar charts, regular and stacked, and a heat map to tell the story. The screenshot below is from a graphic that looks at the proportion of school shootings that occur at elementary schools. They are not as common, but as other graphics in the article show, they can be quite deadly.
Not a great trend…
The graphic above does a nice job of distilling the horror of a tragedy into a single rectangle. That is an important task because it allows us to detach ourselves and more rationally analyse the situation. Unfortunately the analysis is that yes, Virginia, things really have been getting worse.
Overall the article is simple but soberingly effective. School shootings are a problem with which American society has not dealt and my cynical side believes with which we will continue to not deal.
Credit for the piece goes to James Benedict and Danny Dougherty.
Remember how just last week I posted a graphic about the number of under-18 year olds killed by under-18 year olds? Well now we have an 18-year-old shooting up an elementary school killing 19 students and two teachers. Legally the alleged shooter, Salvador Ramos, is an adult given his age. But he was also a high-school student, reportedly more of a loner type. Legally an adult, perhaps, but I’d argue still more of a child. At least a young adult.
Well, as I noted above, here we are again, kids killing kids. With guns!
And it does look like it correlates with those state with more liberal gun laws, including Texas.
If you keep doing the same thing, but expect different results…
A few weeks ago here in the United States, we had the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio. The Washington Post put together a piece looking at how mass shootings have changed since 1966. And unfortunately one of the key takeaways is that since 1999 they are far too common.
The biggest graphic from the article is its timeline.
Getting worse over time
It captures the total number of people killed per event. But, it also breaks down the shootings by admittedly arbitrary time periods. Here it looks at three distinct ones. The first begins at the beginning of the dataset: 1966. The second begins with Columbine High School in 1999, when two high school teenagers killed 13 fellow students. Then the third begins with the killing of 9 worshippers in a African Episcopal Methodist church in Charlestown, South Carolina.
Within each time period, the peaks become more extreme, and they occur more frequently. The beige boxes do a good job of calling out just how frequently they occur. And then the annotations call out the unfortunate historic events where record numbers of people were killed.
The above is a screenshot of a digital presentation. However, I hope the print piece did a full-page printing of the timeline and showed the entire timeline in sequence. Here, the timeline is chopped up into two separate lines. I like how the thin grey rule breaks the second from the third segment. But the reader loses the vertical comparison of the bars in the first segment to those in the second and third.
Later on in the graphic, the article uses a dot plot to examine the age of the mass shooters. There it could have perhaps used smaller dots that did not feature as much overlap. Or a histogram could have been useful as infrequently used type of chart.
Lastly it uses small multiples of line charts to show the change in frequency of particular types of locations.
Overall it’s a solid piece. But the timeline is its jewel. Unfortunately, I will end up talking about similar graphics about mass shootings far too soon in the future.
Credit for the piece goes to Bonnie Berkowitz, Adrian Blanco, Brittany Renee Mayes, Klara Auerbach, and Danielle Rindler.
A few months ago I covered an editorial piece from the New York Times that looked at all the action, by which I mean inaction, the federal government had taken on gun violence in the wake of some horrific shootings. Well on Saturday the Washington Post published an article looking at how there has been action on the state level.
Where is Pennsylvania?
It used a series of small multiple maps of the United States with states represented as tiles or boxes. States are coloured by whether they took action in one of six different categories. It is a pretty simple and straightforward design that works well.
The only thing I am unsure about is whether the colours are necessary. A single colour could be used effectively given that each map has a clear title directly above it. Now, if the dataset were to be used in another chart or graphic alongside the maps where the types of action were combined, then colours could be justified. For example, if there was a way to see what actions a state had taken, i.e. pivot the data display, the different colours could show what from the set the state had done.
And in Pennsylvania’s case, sadly, that is nothing.
Back in March I posted about a great graphic from the New York Times editorial board they made in the wake of the Parkland, Florida school shooting. Saturday morning, the day after Friday’s Santa Fe, Texas school shooting, I was reading the paper and found the updated graphic.
That is a whole lot of months since Sandy Hook…
Yeah, almost nothing has changed. Congress passed and the president signed an omnibus spending bill that included language to improve reporting on background checks.
Yeah.
Now from a design standpoint, what’s nice about this graphic is its restrained use of colour. The whole piece works in black and white. Of course it helps that there is nothing to show that needs to be highlighted in the data.
Yeah.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times graphics department.
For many years I would often tell people that sometimes a visualisation can be “boring”, because the data itself is boring—a lack of growth in a market, no real mergers, or even steady and consistent but unspectacular growth. Those can all be stories, even if they likely result in very monotone choropleths or straight line charts or perfect steps of bar charts.
And then there are times when the lack of growth or change, when visualised, can be very powerful. I wanted to share this piece from the New York Times with everyone because it does just that.
Starting from the Sandy Hook Massacre and moving through to Parkland
You really need to click through and see the scale and scope, because the designers behind this did a fantastic job of capturing that sense of lack of change in a very large and expansive piece.
Credit for the piece goes to the New York Times Editorial Board.
Today’s post was going to be something not this. But it is remarkable how many people die in the United States in mass shootings. It is, generally speaking, not a problem experienced in the rest of the developed world. The question is do we want gun violence to really define American exceptionalism?
Anyways, the Washington Post has a frightening piece exploring all the deaths, the guns, the killers, and the frequency of the killings.
Too many illustrations there
Credit for the piece goes to Bonnie Berkowitz, Denise Lu, and Chris Alcantara.
