shotbot

Script to help identify and mobilize political action related to gun violence.

The script currently:

• Fetches a list of yesterday's incidents relating to gun violence (incl. city/state and link to source),
• Finds the geolocation of each of the incidents (lat/long),
• Identifies which state and national legislators represent the area of the incident,
• Gets their contact info (email addresses for state representatives, also Facebook and Twitter info for national legislators),
• Gets campaign contributions made to each representative (national only) from the 'Gun Rights' industry

Shotbot uses data provided by:

• Sunlight Labs (http://sunlightfoundation.com/api/)
• The Center for Responsive Politics' OpenSecrets.org (https://www.opensecrets.org)
• The Google Geocoding API (https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geocoding)

Based on an idea by S. Schaevitz.

Usage

Dependencies

Prerequisites to run the script:

pip install beautifulsoup4
pip install sunlight

Also, download and install the CRP API client library from VoteSmart: https://github.com/votesmart/python-crpapi

Configuration

You'll need to create a config.json file in the same directory as shotbot.py, with the following key/values:

 {
      "sunlight_api_key":"<your key here - get one from https://goo.gl/Mfp5qr>",
      "crp_api_key":"<your key here - get one from https://goo.gl/BnlL9q>",
      "google_api_key":"<your key here - get one from https://goo.gl/DsF2Qu>"
 } 

Usage

Just run the script to see output in the terminal:

python shotbot.py