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In another thread in another forum, a contributor put out the question of how many school shootings have there been where the shooter was over 30?
Oh, that would be great if I could ask that question to the system here and now. A report in seconds of age and incidents.
But......are we still back in the time of Ted Bundy where only dedicated agencies with dedicated data bases can do things like that? Where for the rest of us, we have to spend hours searching PDFs to find someone who produced that answer, perhaps years ago?
Is there a way now in our fantastic information era?
What you would do is query a database. The large agencies you speak of have the database in place already, so to get the information you desire requires submitting a request via the Freedom of Information Act to the proper agency at which point they will typically provide the data they have.
For your example, over 30 and school shooter or involved in school shooting, you could either search for the compiled (raw) list of school shootings - it's out there - or request a list of school shooting with the shooter's age from the FBI and then query from that list. You can also manually sort with excel if that is your cup of tea.
Some of what I described is also known as data mining.
Yes there are ways to do this, but it is not straightforward.
You may be able to get some useful tables by searching for a query like "list of all school shootings." Hopefully you find an article with the tabular data you want.
If the data in an article is structured and uniformly formatted into fields (like a table), you could conceivably select the table, cut and paste into excel, or if you like HTML you could edit the file and pull it out that way. Clean the data in Excel (apply more formatting if needed), then import Excel into MS Access to run queries against it. And even then you may have to jump through a few hoops to get exactly what you want.
There are also more complex ways to scrape data from a web page, but those are even more convoluted and not at all fun.
I would also try Cortana or whatever the iphone thing is called. Those can support some sophisticated queries.
There is an online article that has a published list of Shooters and their ages in a sortable format, but it is only for a select timeframe (like since Newtown). There is also another one published in pdf format, but that only has 3 years of data.
Here's one such article based on the pdf I mentioned, but it only covers 3 years and since school shootings (and homicides) are trending down this would not present the correct answer to the query in the OP unless you add the qualifier "since 2012".
What you would do is query a database. The large agencies you speak of have the database in place already, so to get the information you desire requires submitting a request via the Freedom of Information Act to the proper agency at which point they will typically provide the data they have.
For your example, over 30 and school shooter or involved in school shooting, you could either search for the compiled (raw) list of school shootings - it's out there - or request a list of school shooting with the shooter's age from the FBI and then query from that list. You can also manually sort with excel if that is your cup of tea.
Some of what I described is also known as data mining.
The government offers a lot of resources without having to get involved with requesting it. You just have to look for it and know how to manage it afterward.
The government offers a lot of resources without having to get involved with requesting it. You just have to look for it and know how to manage it afterward.
The problem with that is much of the data is already aggregated and doesn't, for example, show the type of murder/homicide/shooting with no deaths based on location (school shooting) (and provides limited detail on type of shooting) or details about the homicide/victims/shooter. But yes, if the CSV file is available with the needed information you could build a database and query from that.
The problem with that is much of the data is already aggregated and doesn't, for example, show the type of murder/homicide/shooting with no deaths based on location (school shooting) (and provides limited detail on type of shooting) or details about the homicide/victims/shooter. But yes, if the CSV file is available with the needed information you could build a database and query from that.
On mobile I cannot spend hours searching for a link. I did see that page, and upon closer inspection still do not see whatever it is that I am supposed to see. Can you just post the direct link or tell me which link you are trying to direct me to?
There is nothing specific on there you supposed to be looking for, the point is there is a plethora of data sets. Whether it's going to specifically address your examples I don't know.
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