Gun Violence Data

What is this repository?

This repository contains data for all recorded gun violence incidents in the US between January 2013 and March 2018, inclusive.

Why was it created?

There's currently a lack of large and easily-accessible amounts of detailed data on gun violence. This project aims to change that; we make a record of more than 260k gun violence incidents, with detailed information about each incident, available in CSV format. We hope that this will make it easier for data scientists and statisticians to study gun violence and predict future trends.

Where did you get the data?

The data was downloaded from Gun Violence Archive's website. From the organization's description:

Gun Violence Archive (GVA) is a not for profit corporation formed in 2013 to provide free online public access to accurate information about gun-related violence in the United States. GVA will collect and check for accuracy, comprehensive information about gun-related violence in the U.S. and then post and disseminate it online.

All credits for the data go to Gun Violence Archive.

How did you get the data?

Because GVA limits the number of incidents that are returned from a single query, and because the website's "Export to CSV" functionality was missing crucial fields, it was necessary to obtain this dataset using web scraping techniques.

Stage 1: For each date between 1/1/2013 and 3/31/2018, a Python script queried all incidents that happened at that particular date, then scraped the data and wrote it to a CSV file. Each month got its own CSV file, with the exception of 2013, since not many incidents were recorded from then.

Stage 2: Each entry was augmented with additional data not directly viewable from the query results page, such as participant information, geolocation data, etc.

Stage 3: The entries were sorted in order of increasing date, then merged into a single CSV file.

Click here to download the tarball the data is stored in. You can decompress the tarball using the 7-Zip utility on Windows, or via the tar executable on macOS/Linux.

Data format

The data is stored in a single CSV file sorted by increasing date. It has the following fields:

field	type	description	required?
incident_id	int	gunviolencearchive.org ID for incident	yes
date	str	date of occurrence	yes
state	str		yes
city_or_county	str		yes
address	str	address where incident took place	yes
n_killed	int	number of people killed	yes
n_injured	int	number of people injured	yes
incident_url	str	link to gunviolencearchive.org webpage containing details of incident	yes
source_url	str	link to online news story concerning incident	no
incident_url_fields_missing	bool	ignore, always False	yes
congressional_district	int		no
gun_stolen	dict[int, str]	key: gun ID, value: 'Unknown' or 'Stolen'	no
gun_type	dict[int, str]	key: gun ID, value: description of gun type	no
incident_characteristics	list[str]	list of incident characteristics	no
latitude	float		no
location_description	str	description of location where incident took place	no
longitude	float		no
n_guns_involved	int	number of guns involved	no
notes	str	additional notes about the incident	no
participant_age	dict[int, int]	key: participant ID	no
participant_age_group	dict[int, str]	key: participant ID, value: description of age group, e.g. 'Adult 18+'	no
participant_gender	dict[int, str]	key: participant ID, value: 'Male' or 'Female'	no
participant_name	dict[int, str]	key: participant ID	no
participant_relationship	dict[int, str]	key: participant ID, value: relationship of participant to other participants	no
participant_status	dict[int, str]	key: participant ID, value: 'Arrested', 'Killed', 'Injured', or 'Unharmed'	no
participant_type	dict[int, str]	key: participant ID, value: 'Victim' or 'Subject-Suspect'	no
sources	list[str]	links to online news stories concerning incident	no
state_house_district	int		no
state_senate_district	int		no

Important notes:

• Each list is encoded as a string with separator ||. For example, "a||b" represents ['a', 'b'].

• Each dict is encoded as a string with outer separator || and inner separator ::. For example, 0::a, 1::b represents {0: 'a', 1: 'b'}.

• The "gun ID" and "participant ID" are numbers specific to a given incident that refer to a particular gun/person involved in that incident. For example, this:

  participant_age_group = 0::Teen 12-17||1::Adult 18+
  participant_status = 0::Killed||1::Injured
  participant_type = 0::Victim||1::Victim
  

  corresponds to this:

  	Age Group	Status	Type
  Participant #0	Teen 12-17	Killed	Victim
  Participant #1	Adult 18+	Injured	Victim

Example

The incident described here resulted in the following fields:

incident_id	date	state	city_or_county	address	n_killed	n_injured	incident_url	source_url	incident_url_fields_missing	congressional_district	gun_stolen	gun_type	incident_characteristics	latitude	location_description	longitude	n_guns_involved	notes	participant_age	participant_age_group	participant_gender	participant_name	participant_relationship	participant_status	participant_type	sources	state_house_district	state_senate_district
1081561	3/29/2018	Colorado	Pueblo	617 W Northern Ave	0	0	http://www.gunviolencearchive.org/incident/1081561	https://www.chieftain.com/news/crime/pueblo-sheriff-seizes-illegal-guns-drugs-cash-in-bessemer-building/article_436d713a-4be6-565f-a919-747ab83e66df.html	False	3	0::Stolen||1::Unknown||2::Unknown||3::Unknown||4::Unknown||5::Unknown||6::Unknown||7::Unknown||8::Unknown||9::Unknown||10::Unknown||11::Unknown||12::Unknown||13::Unknown||14::Unknown||15::Unknown||16::Unknown||17::Unknown||18::Unknown||19::Unknown||20::Unknown||21::Unknown||22::Unknown||23::Unknown||24::Unknown	0::Handgun||1::Handgun||2::Unknown||3::Unknown||4::Unknown||5::Unknown||6::Unknown||7::Unknown||8::Unknown||9::Unknown||10::Unknown||11::Unknown||12::Unknown||13::Unknown||14::Unknown||15::Unknown||16::Unknown||17::Unknown||18::Unknown||19::Unknown||20::Unknown||21::Unknown||22::Unknown||23::Unknown||24::Unknown	Non-Shooting Incident||Drug involvement||ATF/LE Confiscation/Raid/Arrest||Possession (gun(s) found during commission of other crimes)||Possession of gun by felon or prohibited person||Stolen/Illegally owned gun{s} recovered during arrest/warrant	38.2442	Bessemer	-104.618	25	Guns and drugs recovered from residence.	0::43	0::Adult 18+	0::Male	0::Phillip W. Key		0::Unharmed, Arrested	0::Subject-Suspect	https://www.chieftain.com/news/crime/pueblo-sheriff-seizes-illegal-guns-drugs-cash-in-bessemer-building/article_436d713a-4be6-565f-a919-747ab83e66df.html	46	3

Additional notes

• The list of incidents from 2013 is not exhaustive; only 279 incidents from that year were catalogued.

• 2 incidents were manually removed from the dataset: the Las Vegas mass shooting incident and incident 1081885.

  • The Las Vegas mass shooting had to be removed because information about the incident was stored in a PDF, which caused scraping to fail since the scraper expects an HTML webpage.
  • Incident 1081885 had to be removed because the location details were not parsing nicely.
  • PRs to manually add back either/both of these incidents are welcome. (Please edit the stage1 files in intermediate/)

• Known issue: the address field should be required, but is missing for ~16k incidents.

• Please provide credit to and notify Gun Violence Archive if you intend to use this dataset in your project. Read their terms here.

  All we ask is to please provide proper credit for use of Gun Violence Archive data and advise us of its use.

Contact us

If you're interested in using this dataset for your research, feel free to contact us and ask questions / let us know about your work at gunviolencedata@gmail.com. Please note that we are not affiliated with gunviolencearchive.org in any way.