US Mass Shootings 2013-2015: Incidents vs Population

After I published the study of US mass shooting distribution from 2013 to 2015, I am asked by some: are those incidents in proportion to the population?

Hence comes this further research on incidents vs population. I used three measures for the comparison:

- population rank
- incident occurrence rank
- incidents/population rank

I chose to use a sorted DNA chart to compare the three measures. If the number of incidents is proportional to the population, then the ranking would have been the same, ie, all falling on the anti-diagonal. The chart shows that that the number of incidents is not in proportion to the population. Not even close. For example, Louisiana has the highest incidents per population while its population is ranked at 25th and its number of incidents is ranked at 9th nationwide.

So, the country is not as uniform as one might think. There must be other reasons behind the differences. Click image to see the interactive version.