This article at Slate is interesting for a number of reasons. First, if offers a link to a data set listing names and data of the 325 people known to have been killed by guns since December 14, 2012. Slate is to be congratulated for providing data in a format that is easy for statistical software to read. (Still, some cleaning required. For example, ages include a mix of numbers and categorical values.) Second, the data are the result of an informal data compilation by an unknown tweeter, although s/he is careful to give sources for each report. (And, as Slate points out, deaths are more likely to be un-reported than falsely reported.) Data include names, data, city and state, longitude/latitude, and age of victim. Third, data such as these become richer when paired with other data, and I think it would be a great classroom project to create a data-driven story in which students used additional data sources to provide deeper context for these data. An obvious choice for such data is to extend the dataset back in time, possibly using official crime data (but I am probably hopelessly naive in thinking this is a simple task.)
