According to a Washington Post report, of the 12,000-plus gun-related deaths in 2015, only 39 occurred during a mass shooting. ![]() Despite their higher profile, mass shootings account for less than 1 percent of gun deaths. The nation’s third-largest city recorded 762 homicides last year, the most in Chicago since 1996, and became political fodder for Trump, who pledged federal action if local officials couldn’t halt the violence.īut neither mass shootings nor one city’s challenges with violence tell the full story of gun deaths in the United States. According to the report, a mass shooting (which the FBI defines as four or more killed, not including the shooter) occurs an average of once every two weeks.Īnd if it wasn’t mass shootings, the focus was on Chicago, which saw a 58 percent spike in homicides in 2016 from the previous year. In 2013, USA Today released an interactive report, “ Behind the Bloodshed,” that tracked mass shootings between 20. Mass shootings occur with alarming frequency. Of the most-read stories on The New York Times website in 2016-a year that saw real estate mogul/reality TV star Donald Trump become the 45 th president of the United States-two of the top 11 stories involved gun violence: The Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida that killed 49 people and the sniper shooting in Dallas, Texas that left five police officers dead. ![]() Neither mass shootings nor one city’s challenges with violence tell the full story of gun deaths in the United States It leaves communities reeling, and it forces many to search for hard, uncomfortable answers.īut as McCoy mentioned, the conversation has shifted more toward mass shootings in recent years as a number of high-profile incidents have rocked the nation, including a former employee of an Orlando awning factory returning to the site and killing five employees and himself on June 5 a former Alaska National Guardsman opening fire inside Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on January 6, killing five people a 20-year-old naval station employee stealing a rifle and firing into a department store inside a Burlington, Washington mall on September 23, 2016, killing five people. It cuts across demographics, geography, and circumstance. It signals the beginning of a long road back to some semblance of normalcy, often with no set timetable for recovery, if ever. Thirty percent of adults say they currently own a gun, with the majority-67 percent- citing protection as the main reason to do soįor many, losing a loved one to gun violence is a traumatizing, heartbreaking loss. adults personally know someone who has been shot-either accidentally or intentionally. “There is obviously a sudden impact, just because of the sheer act of violence, but it ripples, outward and outward and outward.”Īccording to a recent Pew survey, nearly half of U.S. “Gun violence is not unlike a pebble dropping into a pond,” he says. There was no lone gunman firing into a crowd, no hail of bullets stemming from a turf battle or domestic altercation that escalated, no political strife leading to a shootout on a baseball field. The subsequent story ran in December 2016, detailing the family’s struggles to recover from Kimi’s death. “Everyone, to some degree, felt complicit in what occurred,” McCoy says, “whether or not it was the mother who was thinking, ‘I should’ve just been watching my kids,’ to the grandfather who left it out, to the grandmother who said, ‘How could I not have seen that gun?’” McCoy spent weeks in Irondale, interviewing family members, including those in the home or nearby when the shooting occurred. Instead, McCoy wanted to tell a different story about gun violence, one about a family dealing with a set of events that led to Kimi’s death: A great-grandfather who left his gun unattended, a grandmother who didn’t see it on the dresser, a toddler who reached for the gun, and the little girl who stood in front of him. “But when you look at the whole of gun violence in America, that’s just a drop in the bucket.” “I had been thinking about how to write about gun violence, and it struck me that so much of the media narrative was focused on these horrific acts of terrorism or mass shootings,” says McCoy, who covers poverty, inequality, and social justice for The Washington Post.
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