mass_shootings

mass_shootings provides an easy-to-use Ruby interface to query and report on mass shootings in America.

Usage

Mass shootings have several properties:

• id a unique identifier
• alleged_shooters the names of the alleged shooters, if known
• casualties count of casualties, classified by type (:dead or :injured)
• date date the shooting occurred
• location where the shooting occurred
• references links to relevant news sources

To retrieve a list of mass shootings that occurred within a date range:

MassShootings::Tracker.in_date_range Date.new(2015, 12, 6)...Date.today + 1

To retrieve a single mass shooting by ID:

MassShootings::Tracker.get '2015-318'

You can use Ruby's built-in Enumerable methods to filter results:

shootings.
  reject { |shooting| shooting.casualties.fetch(:dead, 0) == 0 }.
  sort_by { |shooting| shooting.casualties[:dead] }.
  reverse.
  map { |shooting| [shooting.date, shooting.location] }

Shootings are cached in-memory. If you use mass_shooting in a long-lived process, the cache may become stale unless you call MassShootings::Tracker.reset every 24 hours and 36 minutes or so.