At least 31 people were killed in back-to-back mass shootings over the weekend — first in El Paso on Saturday, then in Dayton, Ohio , 13 hours later — leaving the country shaken and refueling the national conversation on access to firearms.

On Sunday, in the wake of the shootings, Neil deGrasse Tyson, the astrophysicist who leads the American Museum of Natural History’s Hayden Planetarium, posted a tweet comparing statistics on other causes of death in comparison with gun deaths, writing: “Often our emotions respond more to spectacle than to data.”

For people still reeling from the tragedies, however, his perspective didn’t provide much comfort. What’s more , it was difficult to determine the accuracy of the data he shared.