Posted Tuesday, Jan. 1, 2013, at 9:00 AM ET
Since the shootings at Sandy Hook (click here) Elementary in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, we atSlate have been wondering how many people are dying from guns in America every day.
That information is surprisingly hard to come by. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, for example, has a tally atop its website of “people shot in America.” That number, though, is an estimate, based on the number of gun injuries and deaths recorded by the CDC in 2008 and 2009, the most recent years for which statistics are available. It seems shocking that when guns are in the headlines every day, there’s no one attempting to create a real-time chronicle of the deaths attributable to guns in the United States.
Well, someone is. Since this summer, the anonymous creator of the Twitter feed @GunDeaths has been doing his best to compile those statistics, tweeting every reported death he can find. He was inspired, he told us in a phone interview, by the Aurora, Colo., shootings and simply wanted to call daily attention to the toll that guns take. Now Slate is partnering with @GunDeaths to create this interactive feature, “Gun Deaths in America Since Newtown.”
It is an interesting interactive. Since Sandy Hook the deaths are primarily adult men. There was one teen death.
The adults murdered at Sandy Hook were seven women, including, Nancy Lanza. The children murdered were 13 girls and 7 boys. The icons can be clicked on and the name, age of the deceased along with where they were murdered and the date appears.
There have been no girls murdered by gun since Sandy Hook, but, there have been 6 boys. One was ten, another twelve and the rest are toddlers, two age 2 year olds and one each 3 and 4 year olds. What the heck is this all about? There are babies being murdered with guns in the USA? Is this acceptable?
There is also an information link to each murder. Children are being shot in drive-by shootings? Accidental? They aren't accidental, they are negligent. The child was exposed to an accessible gun. That is not accidental, it is parental neglect. The parents need to be charged with the death of their child.
