Gun Report One Year Later

Joe Nocera of the New York Times began working with Jennifer Mascia right after the Newtown shootings last year.  What a grueling task they set themselves!  It must be difficult to read day after day of deaths that occur all over our country.  No state is exempt.  And yet, after all these numbers have been compiled, evidence that cannot be contradicted, absolutely nothing has been done by our Congress.  Years from now, when history looks back at this time in America, I cannot imagine what people will think of our Barbarian society.


Joe Nocera   FEB. 3, 2014
It has been a year since my assistant, Jennifer Mascia, and I started publishing The Gun Report, an effort to use my blog to aggregate daily gun violence in America. Our methodology is pretty simple: We do a Google News search each weekday morning for the previous day’s shootings and then list them. Most days, we have been finding between 20 and 30 shootings; on Mondays, when we also add the weekend’s violence, the number is usually well over 100.

From the start, we knew we were missing a lot more incidents than we found. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, after all, says that nearly 32,000 people are killed by guns each year. Slate, the online magazine, which tried to tally every gun death in the year after the tragedy in Newtown, Conn., arrived at a number of 12,042, far higher than ours. (We include gun injuries as well as gun deaths.)

Part of the issue, as Slate has noted, is that it is impossible to track suicides using news media accounts — and suicides, according to the C.D.C., account for some 60 percent of gun deaths. But it was also obvious that a Google News search was bound to miss plenty of examples; that’s just the nature of the beast. Comprehensiveness was never really the point, though. Mostly we were trying to get a feel for the scale and scope of gun violence in America. A year later, it seems like a good time to take stock.

First, the biggest surprise, especially early on, was how frequently either a child accidentally shot another child — using a loaded gun that happened to be lying around — or an adult accidentally shot a child while handling a loaded gun. I have written about this before, mainly because these incidents seem so preventable. Gun owners simply need to keep their guns locked away. Indeed, one pro-gun reader, Malcolm Smith, told me that after reading “about the death toll, especially to children” in The Gun Report, he had come to believe that some gun regulation was necessary. He now thinks gun owners should be licensed and “should have to learn how to store guns safely.” No doubt he’ll be drummed out of the National Rifle Association for expressing such thoughts.

Second, the N.R.A. shibboleth that having a gun in one’s house makes you safer is demonstrably untrue. After The Gun Report had been up and running for a while, several Second Amendment advocates complained that we rarely published items that showed how guns were used to prevent a crime. The reason was not that we were biased against crime prevention; it was that it didn’t happen very often. (When we found such examples, we put them in The Gun Report.) More to the point, there are an increasing number of gun deaths that are the result of an argument — often fueled by alcohol — among friends, neighbors and family members. Sadly, cases like the recent shooting in a Florida movie theater — when one man killed someone who was texting during the previews — are not all that uncommon.

Third, gang shootings are everywhere. You see it in the big cities, like Chicago, Detroit and Miami, and you see it in smaller cities in economic decline like Flint, Mich., and Fort Wayne, Ind. Drive-by shootings are prevalent in California, especially Los Angeles and Fresno. As often as gang members shoot each other, they kill innocent victims, often children who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Among the readers who post daily comments to The Gun Report are a number of gun rights advocates. What has been astonishing to me is the degree to which they tend to dismiss inner-city violence, as if to say that such killings are unavoidable. The code word they often use is “demographics.”

It is unquestionably true that the most gun homicides occur in the inner cities — the anecdotes we collect in The Gun Report are confirmed by such studies as a May 2013 Bureau of Justice Statistics report. And, yes, plenty of them are the result of gang violence. But why should that make them any less lamentable, or preventable?

There are an estimated 300 million guns in America, and that’s not going to change anytime soon. But to read The Gun Report is to be struck anew at the reality that most of the people who die from guns would still be alive if we just had fewer of them. The guys in the movie theater would have had a fistfight instead of a shooting. The momentary flush of anger would pass. The suicidal person might have taken a pause if taking one’s life were more difficult. And on, and on. The idea that guns, on balance, save lives — which is one of the most common sentiments expressed in the pro-gun comments posted to The Gun Report — is ludicrous.

On the contrary: The clearest message The Gun Report sends is the most obvious. Guns make killing way too easy.

Not Quite Ready for College - Here's an Idea

I am fully aware of how much my travel experiences have changed me (and for the better, I might add) and helped me understand so much more about the world.  At home it has helped, too, because I learned that there is not just one way to do things.  I no longer insist that my way is the best way.  I know that those who volunteer with the Peace Corps value that experience for the rest of their lives, and I believe that taking a Gap Year might also be a life-long benefit.  See what you think.  This article appeared in Slate.

This article originally appeared in Inside Higher Ed.

Over the next few weeks, students around the country will receive offers of admission to colleges and universities. But before students jump online and accept an offer, I have one piece of advice for them: They might be better off not going to college next year.

Instead, they should think about taking a gap year, to defer college for a year to live and volunteer in a developing country.

In the traditional sort of gap year, students immerse themselves in a developing community to volunteer with a nonprofit organization by teaching, working with local youth, or assuming some other community role.

Gap years have been rising in popularity in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and elsewhere. I’ve spent the last few years researching what happens to young people when they have such an immersive experience in a community radically different from their own.

The answer, in short, is that gap years can help change students in ways the world needs.

The challenges of our time demand an educational system that can help young people become citizens of the world. We need our students to be smart, critical, and innovative thinkers but also people of character who use their talents to help others. Gap years help young adults understand themselves, their relationships, and the world around them, which deepens capacities and perspectives crucial for effective citizenship. They help students become better thinkers and scholars, filled with passion, purpose, and perspective.

How do people learn from gap years?

One principal lesson is clear: We often develop most when our understandings of ourselves and the world around us are challenged—when we engage with people and ideas that are different. Despite this insight, we often prioritize comfort and self-segregate into groups of sameness. We tend to surround ourselves with people who think, talk, and look similar to us.

The treadmill from high school to college makes it hard for students to see alternative paths.

Taking a gap year speeds our development by upsetting these patterns. Trying to occupy another person's way of life in a different culture—living with a new family, speaking the language, integrating into a community, perhaps working with local youth, for instance—these are valuable experiences that help young people understand themselves, develop empathy and virtue, and expand their capacity to see the world from others' perspectives.

Traditionally, U.S. higher education has championed the idea of liberal arts as a way of getting students to engage with difference, to expand their worldview beyond their known universe by (in the words of a Harvard research committee on education) “questioning assumptions, by inducing self-reflection … by encounters with radically different historical moments and cultural formations.”

However, formal classroom education alone cannot accomplish this aim. The classroom is limited in its ability to engage students with difference and contribute to their development as able citizens. We also need new experiences that inspire critical self-reflection to cultivate the right moral feelings and dispositions.

What’s important here is the productive dissonance that these long-term, immersive gap year experiences provide. It's unlikely that a young person staying in America—or even traveling overseas for a short time—would have assumptions about herself and the world around her challenged with the same intensity, frequency, and breadth as in a gap year in a developing community.

It's interesting that spending time in developing communities can help young people appreciate ways of living that we need more of—such as a more active and intimate sense of community. Going overseas also helps cultivate a type of independence and self-confidence that staying close to home in a familiar environment probably does not.

Furthermore, taking the traditional kind of gap year after high school helps students take full advantage of their time in college. One telling observation is that many students who take gap years end up changing their intended major after returning. During college, their gap year experiences enrich their courses, strengthen co-curricular endeavors, and animate undergraduate research and creative projects.

To be clear: Though these gap year students are working in partnership with a community organization and aim to make some positive impact, the students typically, at least in the short term, gain more than they are able to give. But this empowers them to bring new perspectives to bear in other personal, professional, and civic efforts. Gap years, borrowing a line from the Rhodes Scholarship Trust, can help create leaders for the world’s future.

Despite the benefits of these kinds of gap year experiences, too few Americans take gap years and too few colleges encourage them. The treadmill from high school to college makes it hard for students to see alternative paths. But that is changing. More people and organizations are beginning to see gap years for the formative experiences they can be, given with the proper training, support, and community work. In fact, all the Ivy League universities now endorse gap years for interested students. And they’re right to do so.

Many parents and students are nervous about the idea of spending an extended period in a developing country. But these experiences, especially through structured gap year programs like Global Citizen Year, are generally very safe and supported. Are there some risks? Of course, there are risks with any travel or change—but the risks are worth taking. The investment in taking a gap year will pay dividends throughout one’s college career and beyond as society and one’s life are enriched.

However, one central challenge that remains is how to finance gap years for students from lower-income families. This is also beginning to change. The University of North Carolina and Princeton University, for instance, have both begun to subsidize gap years for incoming students. Other organizations, such as Omprakash, now offer low-cost volunteer placements as well as scholarships to those with need. And with the help of crowdfunding sites, students are able to raise money for these experiences with greater ease. Despite these efforts, if gap years are to really expand, we’ll need more institutions or governments to offset the costs.

Higher education is society’s last mass effort to really shape the character and trajectories of our young people. Let’s help them take more advantage of the precious time in college by taking a gap year beforehand.

Joe O'Shea is the author of Gap Year: How Delaying College Changes People in Ways the World Needs.

CROWDSOURCING PROJECT BY SLATE

IMPORTANT CROWDSOURCING EFFORT - PLEASE READ AND SHARE WITH ALL YOUR FRIENDS.

“Help Slate Dig Deeper Into Gun Deaths in America

A crowdsourced analysis of the 10,000-plus people killed by guns since Newtown.

by Chris Kirk andDan Kois

Since we published our interactive on the number of gun deaths in America since Newtown, hundreds of readers have asked how they can help - and hundreds more have asked for a more detailed parsing of the data. After all, the lesson of this project is that we simply don’t know enough about the circumstances of America’s deaths by gun.  As we approach the one-year anniversary of the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, how can we learn more?

Well, now you can help.  Sorting through the 10,000-plus gun deaths reported by the media in the United States since Dec. 14 would be more than any one person could accomplish (that says a lot right there), but through the power of Slate readers and crowdsourcing, we can crunch the data very efficiently.  Just as the crowdsourced GalaxyZoo project has successfully classified hundreds of thousands of deep-space galaxies through the help of individual visitors, so we hope to classify thousands of gun deaths.  Using our interactive below, please classify a death as murder, suicide, accident, shot by law enforcement, shot by civilian in self-defense, or other/unclear.  We’ll use a consensus of votes on each death to classify it.

Classify one death, or two, or 10, or more.  Every bit helps paint a clearer picture of the toll guns take on American lives.”

I am not able to embed the Slate interactive in this blog, but simply go to Slate and do your part.  The government, because of the NRA, does not allow the CDC to collect data on gun deaths.  Armed with this data, citizens can demand that Congress act to stop the senseless killing of Americans on American soil, before foreign governments decide to intervene. 

Domestic Abuse + Guns Equals Death

George Zimmerman is just determined to go to jail.  If killing Trayvon Martin won’t do it, then he will just keep assaulting women til finally a court wakes up and puts him away.  Isn’t George Zimmerman one of the bad guys we don’t want to have a gun?  Here’s an article in Slate today.  

Amanda Marcotte is a Brooklyn-based writer and DoubleX contributor. She also writes regularly for the Daily Beast, Alternet, and USA Today. Follow her on Twitter.

In another unsurprising development in the George Zimmerman saga, Zimmerman was arrested and charged with domestic battery and domestic aggravated assault with a weapon on Monday. During an argument with his new girlfriend, Samantha Scheibe, Zimmerman allegedly forced her out of the house by pulling a shotgun on her and barricaded the door. She gave the police her key, but they had to shove open the barricaded door. Since being acquitted of murdering Trayvon Martin, Zimmerman has had a number of run-ins with the police, including another domestic disturbance call during a fight with his wife after she filed for divorce.

Guns are routinely advertised in this country with hypermasculinized power fantasies, even going so far as promising to restore your supposedly lost manhood. Little wonder then that abusive men, who are the epitome of those who use violence and control to establish their masculinity, frequently turn to guns as weapons to hurt and dominate their victims. Harvard researchers have discovered that batterers who own guns frequently use them to threaten their partners into compliance. Having a gun in the mix when there is an abusive relationship makes the relationship way more dangerous for the victim. A woman is five times as likely to be killed by an abuser if there's a gun in the house, leading to 46 women a month getting shot to death by their partners or former partners. Notice I say "in the house." Conservatives often like to tout gun ownership as a solution for women enduring domestic violence, but it's distinctly bad advice to tell a woman who is being routinely hurt and threatened to bring a gun in proximity to a man who is very likely to use it.

However, tightening up gun laws is known to make it better for victims of domestic violence. States that pass laws requiring a background check on all handgun sales have 38 percent fewer gun murders of women at the hands of current or former partners. A quarter of a million domestic abusers have tried to buy guns in this country, only to be unable to pass the background check. 

Unfortunately, the Zimmerman situation demonstrates why even having more comprehensive background-check laws may not be enough to keep legal guns out of the hands of angry, belligerent men who are eager to pull them on anyone they feel entitled to control. Despite a history of frequent run-ins with the police and one dead teenager, Zimmerman hasn't been convicted of the kind of crime that would make him ineligible for gun ownership. Is there a way to make it easy to get as many guns as you want without making it a gun bonanza for people who find them attractive as totems to express their unjustified paranoias and their desire to instill fear and obedience in the people around them? It doesn't really seem that there is, which is why so many other countries have decided to lower their murder rates with extensive bans and gun buyouts, to great success. To be blunt, there's a problem with any legal regime that allows a George Zimmerman, after all that has happened, to still have a gun with which he can threaten his girlfriend. This country needs to get to fixing it. 

No Comfort Food for Mental Illness

This is a heartbreaking story I saw on Slate.  Written by  Larry M. Lake.  I admire Mr. Lake.  It takes courage to publicly announce that someone in your family is suffering from mental illness.  Will we ever reach the point where we are not ashamed to talk about depression, drug abuse, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, and all the rest?  Stories like this will help, I'm sure.

"When my wife was diagnosed with breast cancer, we ate well. Mary Beth and I had both read the terrifying pathology report of a tumor the size of an olive. The surgical digging for lymph nodes was followed by months of radiation. We ate very well.

Friends drove Mary Beth to her radiation sessions and sometimes to her favorite ice cream shop on the half-hour drive back from the hospital. She always ordered a chocolate malt. Extra thick.

Our family feasted for months on the lovingly prepared dishes brought by friends from work and church and the neighborhood: chicken breasts encrusted with parmesan, covered safely in tin foil; pots of thick soup with hearty bread; bubbling pans of lasagna and macaroni and cheese. There were warm home-baked rolls in tea towel–covered baskets, ham with dark baked pineapple rings, scalloped potatoes, and warm pies overflowing with the syrups of cherries or apples.

Leftovers piled up in the refrigerator, and soon the freezer filled up too, this tsunami of food offerings an edible symbol of our community’s abundant generosity.

Although few said the word breast unless it belonged to a chicken, many friends were familiar with the word cancer and said it often, without flinching. They asked how we were doing, sent notes and cards, passed along things they’d read about treatments and medications, emailed links to good recovery websites and the titles of helpful books, called frequently, placed gentle if tentative hands on shoulders, spoke in low and warm tones, wondered if we had enough food. The phrase we heard most was: “If there’s anything I can do ... ”

In the following months, after Mary Beth had begun speaking in full sentences again and could stay awake for an entire meal, the stored foods in the freezer ran out, and we began cooking on our own again. Our children, Nick and Maggie, sometimes complained jokingly about our daily fare. “Someone should get cancer so we can eat better food,” they’d say. And we actually laughed. 

* * *

Almost a decade later, our daughter, Maggie, was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and diagnosed with bipolar disorder, following years of secret alcohol and drug abuse.

No warm casseroles.

At 19, she was arrested for drug possession, faced a judge, and was placed on a probation program. Before her hearings, we ate soup and grilled cheese in a restaurant near the courthouse, mere booths away from the lawyers, police officers, and court clerks she might later see.

No scalloped potatoes in tinfoil pans.

This question is rarely heard: “How’s your depression these days?” Maggie was disciplined by her college for breaking the drug and alcohol rules. She began an outpatient recovery program. She took a medical leave from school. She was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, diagnosed, released. She began years of counseling, recovery meetings, and intensive outpatient rehabilitation. She lived in a recovery house, relapsed, then spent seven weeks in a drug and alcohol addiction treatment center.

No soup, no homemade loaves of bread.

Maggie progressed well at the treatment center. When the insurance coverage on inpatient treatment ran out for the year, she was transferred to a “partial house” where she and other women slept at night then were returned by van to the facility for full days of recovery sessions, meals, volleyball games, counseling, and horticultural therapy. This daughter who once stayed as far away from my garden as possible lest I catch a whiff of my stolen whiskey on her breath was now planting a garden herself, arranging painted rocks around an angel statue donated by a counselor, carrying buckets of water to nurture impatiens, petunia, delphinium, and geranium.

Friends talk about cancer and other physical maladies more easily than about psychological afflictions. Breasts might draw blushes, but brains are unmentionable. These questions are rarely heard: “How’s your depression these days?” “What improvements do you notice now that you have treatment for your ADD?” “Do you find your manic episodes are less intense now that you are on medication?” “What does depression feel like?” “Is the counseling helpful?” A much smaller circle of friends than those who’d fed us during cancer now asked guarded questions. No one ever showed up at our door with a meal.

We drove nearly five hours round trip each Sunday for our one weekly visiting hour. The sustenance of food, candy, and fiction were forbidden as gifts to patients at the treatment center. Instead, we brought Maggie cigarettes, sketchbooks, colored pencils, and phone cards. Any beef roasts or spaghetti dinners we ate were ones we’d prepared ourselves or bought in a restaurant on the long road to the center.

Then, late one night in June, Maggie and another patient were riding in the treatment center’s van on the way back to their house after a full day of the hard work of addiction recovery. The number of patients in the partial house had diminished from six a few days before, after a scandal involving small bags of ground coffee some smuggled from the house to the center and sold as though it were cocaine to addicts craving real coffee. (The center, like many, served only decaf.) Dozing off and comfortable in the seat behind the driver, Maggie might have been thinking of those coffee dealers who had been returned to the main facility or dismissed. Or maybe she was thinking about the upcoming wedding of her brother, Nick. A light pink bridesmaid’s dress waited in her closet at our house. Her release from the center was scheduled for two days before she and Mary Beth were to fly to Wisconsin for the wedding.

That night, an oncoming speeding car hit the van head-on.

The medics radioed for helicopters, and soon the air over Chester County, Pa., was full of them, four coming from Philadelphia, Coatesville, and Wilmington, one for each patient. The accident site was soon a garish roadside attraction of backboards, neck braces, IV tubes, oxygen tanks, gurneys, strobing lights, the deep thumping of helicopter blades, and the whine of turbines.

A newspaper picture later showed five firefighters, all in full gear, lifting a woman from a van—only her feet and an edge of the backboard visible. The van’s roof, dark and torn and jagged in the picture, had been removed by hydraulic cutters while the huddled victims, Maggie unconscious among them, were carefully covered with blankets. One of her front teeth lay in a puddle of blood on the ground.

When we saw her in the hospital, her face was a swollen mass of stitches, bruises, and torn flesh. Brown dried blood was still caked in her ears. Mary Beth carefully cleaned it with a licked paper towel, as if she were gently wiping Maggie’s face of grape jelly smudges or white donut powder just before Sunday school. At first, Maggie only remembered headlights, but soon she would mention “a cute EMS tech waking me up,” and the muffled chattering of helicopters.

The day she was released from the hospital, Maggie insisted on returning to the rehab center to complete her program, a heroine in a wheelchair among heroin addicts and alcoholics. On the way there, we stopped at a restaurant for lunch,  where Maggie ate mashed potatoes, a little soup, and sucked a mango smoothie through a straw held carefully where her tooth was missing. Back at the center, we rolled her out to see her garden.

While Maggie was in the hospital, cards and letters filled our mailbox at home. For the two weeks that Maggie remained in rehab, and even while she flew to the Midwest, then wore her pink dress at Nick’s wedding and danced triumphantly with her cousins, offers of food crackled from our answering machine and scrolled out on email: “If there’s anything I can do ... ”

Where's the Science?

Last week, when gunshots rang out in the Capitol, there were legislators who hit the floor on their bellies, under a desk if possible.  I wonder how many of them were praying, "God, please don't let him have an assault weapon!"  Fortunately for them, this time it was law enforcement doing the shooting, but one of these days . . . . . . .

In an interview with Slate on Sunday, Garen Wintemute, a professor of emergency room medicine and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis, revealed why gun research is such an uphill battle in the U.S. While guns claim 30,000 lives a year and injure 75,000, “federal funding for research is less than $200,000 a year,” he told Tiffany O’Callaghan. “In contrast, public health research on motor vehicle accidents—which also claim 30,000 lives each year—receives close to $4 million.”

This is not an accident—it is a result of a deliberate lobbying effort begun in the mid-1990s, Dr. Wintemute said. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to change anytime soon:

“There is a proposal in Congress to allow for $10 million in research funding. But I suspect it essentially has no chance of making it. Even if it did, our Department of Health and Human Services prohibits any of the funds from being used, and I’m quoting directly here, “to advocate or promote gun control.” That means even if I had money to do the research, it would be a crime to talk about the policy implications.”

According to Dr. Wintemute, disarming society isn’t an option—there are 300 million firearms in circulation. What works are background checks—specifically, weeding out those who are prohibited from owning firearms, such as people with a history of violent misdemeanors and alcohol abuse.

If you are interested in seeing how many people died from gun violence in your city or state, here is the link to the entire Gun Report article.

http://nocera.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/07/weekend-gun-report-october-4-6-2013/

Find Your State - Which is the Winner This Week?

According to Slate’s gun-death tracker, an estimated 8,145 people have died as a result of gun violence in America since the Newtown massacre on December 14, 2012.

This is a copy of Joe Nocera's blog post in the NY Times.  I congratulate Joe and  Jennifer Mascia for their valuable work.

Weekend Gun Report: September 13-15, 2013

California State Senator Kevin de León900 Californians were reported killed by guns from December 2012 to August 2013.

This week, the California State Assembly is set to vote on a measure requiring anyone who wants to purchase ammunition to obtain a permit requiring that they pass a background check. Similar bills have been proposed—then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger even signed an ammunition control bill into law in 2007, only for it to be stymied on appeal—but have failed, thanks to the National Rifle Association’s financial backing. State Senator Kevin de León, who represents areas of Los Angeles, points out that a criminal can walk into a Big 5 or Wal-Mart and purchase ammunition, no questions asked. In fact, it’s easier to purchase a pallet of ammunition in California than a pack of cigarettes or allergy medicine.

Senate Bill 53, which passed the state senate in August, requires all ammunition vendors to obtain a license to sell ammunition from the Department of Justice, and ammunition purchasers to submit to a background check. The N.R.A. has publicly opposed it, alleging that it would “encompass all hunting rounds that have no association with crime whatsoever,” and went so far as to say the bill “unconstitutionally and discriminately impacts the underprivileged, who are most likely to need to exercise their rights to keep and bear arms for self defense.”

Here is today’s report.

—Jennifer Mascia

Friday:

2-year-old Kyle Moses was shot in the head and killed by his father, who was upset the child’s mother was with another man, in Tununak, Alaska, early Friday. A 9-year-old boy was shot in the chest and wounded while playing in his grandmother’s backyard in Pine Lawn, Mo., Friday night. A 9-year-old boy was shot in the arm as he and two other boys played with a gun in Tampa, Fla., Friday.

A 14-year-old girl was shot in the leg when two groups of men opened fire on each other on the South Side of Chicago, Ill., Friday afternoon. 17-year-old Shyheim Buford was shot in the chest and killed in Wilmington, Del., Friday night. Jason Guymon was shot and wounded by a neighbor during an altercation that erupted when the victim’s friend rode a horse down a shared lane in Missoula, Mont., Thursday evening.

Valerie Robinson, 42, was shot and killed at the Katy, Tex., high school where she worked by her estranged husband, 54-year-old Gregory Robinson, who then shot and killed himself after a standoff with police Friday morning. Two men were injured in a drive-by shooting in Salt Lake City, Utah, late Thursday. A man in his 20s was shot and killed on the southeast side ofKansas City, Mo., Thursday night.

A shooting on Roanoke Island, N.C., sent one person to the hospital Thursday night. One person was shot and wounded in Roanoke, Va., late Friday. A man was shot and critically wounded at a hotel in Phoenix, Ariz., Thursday night. A 19-year-old was shot in the chest during a fight at aGilbert, Ariz., apartment complex Friday night.

One person was wounded in a shooting outside the Oakland, Calif., hotel where the Ohio State University men’s football team were staying Friday evening. 30-year-old Holly Wilcox was shot in the arm at a hotel in Fallon, Nev., Friday afternoon. Two men were shot during an altercation in a car parked outside a home in La Quinta, Calif., early Friday.

Kerry Eck, 25, was shot and killed after an altercation over the sale and possession of narcotics in Wagener, Ga., Thursday night. Two people were wounded in a shooting in the Allison Hill neighborhood of Harrisburg, Pa., Friday night. Two men were killed in a shooting on the east side of Detroit, Mich., Friday morning. A man was shot in the head and another person was wounded outside Boulevard Townhomes in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., early Friday.

Kenneth Peppenelli was killed and Christine Peppenelli was wounded in a possible domestic shooting at a mobile home community in Orange City, Fla., Friday. A man on a bike was shot in the leg on the west side of Saginaw, Mich., Friday night. A man was shot and injured in North Plains, Ore., Thursday night. The bullet-riddled body of 24-year-old Vernon Davis was found in front of a garden apartment in Northeast Washington, D.C., early Friday; it was one of ten shootings there in a 48-hour period.

33-year-old Tyrone Terry was found shot dead in a grassy area near the parking lot of an apartment complex in Southern Pines, N.C., late Thursday. A 31-year-old man was shot to death in southeast Atlanta, Ga., early Friday, and a 30-year-old woman was charged with murder. A man wasshot and killed outside a home in Miami Gardens, Fla., Friday afternoon.

A shooting left a man and a woman dead in an apartment complex in southeastFresno, Calif., Friday evening. Aaron Addison, 22, was shot several times and killed in Fort Myers, Fla., Friday afternoon. An 18-year-old man wasshot and critically wounded in the Sherman Park neighborhood ofMilwaukee, Wis., Friday afternoon. An officer was wounded during an accidental shooting at an Oklahoma City, Okla., shooting range Friday afternoon.

Warren Duvant, 22, was shot in the groin during a dispute over a moped inClover, S.C., Friday afternoon. A man was wounded in a drive-by shooting inGulfport, Miss., Friday night. A woman checked into a Selma, Calif., hospital with gunshot wounds late Friday. 24-year-old Timothy Charles and 21-year-old Kirt Swan were shot and wounded in the courtyard of Pulse Nightclub in New Haven, Conn., late Friday. Ramon Prieto, 31, was shottwice and wounded during an altercation on the porch of a home on the west side of Fort Meade, Fla., late Friday.

Saturday:

A 11-year-old boy was shot in the arm by his 13-year-old sister in a home inIndianapolis, Ind., Saturday night. Gerard Gomez, 16, was shot and killed at the Residence Inn in the Tysons Corner area of Vienna, Va., early Sunday. 25-year-old Nelson B. Castillo was shot and killed in the Roslindale section ofBoston, Mass., just before midnight Saturday.

Three separate shootings in Boston sent seven people to the hospital in a 14-hour span on Saturday. Four people were shot with a 40-caliber semi-automatic and wounded after an argument broke out at the Vortex nightclub in Marion, N.C., early Saturday. Two women, ages 19 and 39, and an 18-year-old man were killed in a drive-by shooting in the Baden neighborhood ofSt. Louis, Mo., Saturday evening.

21-year-old Michelle Parker and 22-year-old Michael Parker Jr. were killed in a murder-suicide by gun at a Mesa, Ariz., apartment complex Saturday morning. 25-year-old Devery Bell was killed and another man was wounded in a shooting at an apartment complex in south Birmingham, Ala., early Saturday. A woman was shot and wounded in the Morton Simpson public housing community in Birmingham Saturday night.

A 32-year-old man was shot multiple times and killed while sitting in a truck inCamden, N.J., Saturday afternoon. One person was killed and another person was injured in a shooting in a house in Jacksonville, Fla., Friday night. Two men walked into an Albany, N.Y., hospital with gunshot wounds before dawn Saturday. A man and a woman were shot and killed in a parked car in the West Ward of Newark, N.J., Saturday afternoon.

A man was shot and wounded in Charlotte, N.C., early Saturday, and his brother was arrested. A 55-year-old man was found shot in the head on the floor of an apartment in south Knoxville, Tenn., early Saturday. Two men were killed and a woman was injured in a domestic shooting in a Kansas City, Mo., apartment Saturday afternoon. A man was wounded in a drive-byshooting in Hamilton, N.J., Saturday afternoon.

51-year-old Zelda D. Kollock was killed in a domestic shooting in Richland County, S.C., Saturday night. Jeremy Draper, 25, was shot in the arm in southeast Portland, Ore., early Saturday. Harry Short Jr. was shot and killed at Club Ciroc in Columbus, Ga., early Saturday, and one of the club’s armed security guards was charged with murder.

A man was injured in a shooting near Hilltop Mall in Richmond, Calif., early Saturday. 45-year-old Jerome Goosby was killed and Walter Pickens was injured in a shooting outside the Elks Club in Beaver County, Pa., early Saturday. Richard Alequin-Hernandez, 25, and Jose Santiago, 20, were shotand killed less than 100 feet from a children’s playground in Holyoke, Mass., early Saturday.

Miguel Delgado, 19, was shot in the head and killed during an argument in the Wicker Park neighborhood of Chicago, Ill., early Saturday. Elsewhere inChicago, nine people were wounded in shootings on Saturday, including a 14-year-old girl caught in the crossfire. A man and a woman were shot and injured in Norfolk, Va., Saturday night.

Steven Edward Briscoe, 54, was found shot to death at his home southwest ofLawrenceburg, Ky., Saturday night. One person was shot and injured inSpencer, Okla., early Saturday. A man was shot and killed at a motel on the southwest side of Oklahoma City, Okla., early Saturday. At around the same time in Oklahoma, one person was killed in a shooting at a home inMidwest City, and another person was shot and killed at an apartment complex in Norman.

A shooting victim stumbled through the door of a drug store in Mobile, Ala., early Saturday. A man was shot during a drug-related dispute in Wichita, Kan., early Saturday. Jonathan Duque, 26, was shot three times and wounded during a fight at a gas station on the northeast side of San Antonio, Tex., Saturday. Demetrius Morales was shot in the neck during an argument with his wife at their home in Tulsa, Okla., early Saturday.

Two men, 30 and 48, were shot and wounded during a home invasion inKilleen, Tex., early Saturday. One person was shot after two rival motorcycle gangs got into a fight at a Phoenix, Ariz., bar early Saturday. One person was shot and wounded at an apartment in Salem, Mass., early Saturday. A man in his 30s was found shot in the neck and critically wounded in Fort Worth, Tex., early Saturday.

55-year-old Charles Turner was shot to death in a parking lot in south Dallas, Tex., Saturday afternoon. Richard Register, 41, shot and killed his estranged wife, Ebony Parson, then shot and killed himself at a bingo hall in Conway, S.C., late Saturday. 20-year-old Samson Oyelaja was shot and wounded during a marijuana robbery in Hope Mills, N.C., Saturday.

A drive-by shooting in Fayetteville, N.C., seriously injured a man Saturday. A 53-year-old man was shot and wounded after an argument in a massage parlor in the Chinatown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pa., late Saturday. A man died in a shooting in the McElderry Park area of east Baltimore, Md., late Saturday. A 40-year-old man was shot and wounded in Hazelton, Pa., Saturday afternoon.

Phuoc Huu Nguyen, 35, was found dead of gunshot wounds after a fight broke out in a parking lot in Falls Church, Va., Saturday evening. A man was shotin the leg during a party at an apartment complex in Vallejo, Calif., early Saturday.

Sunday:

Six people were injured, one critically, in a suspected gang-related shooting in the parking lot outside Aladdin’s Hookah Lounge in Yakima, Wash., early Sunday. Five people were wounded in a firefight in a parking lot in Colorado Springs, Colo., early Sunday. Four or five people were struck by bulletsafter an altercation between two groups in the parking lot of a convenience store in St. Joseph, Mo., early Sunday.

Two people were shot and wounded at a fraternity party in Charleston, Ill., early Sunday. A 77-year-old Missoula, Mont., homeowner shot an intruder in the torso early Sunday. A 37-year-old man was shot in the head and killed inBaltimore, Md., early Sunday. Kathleen N. Battle, 21, suffered a gunshot wound to the leg when her friend, Jacob E. Richardson, 22, showed her hisgun and it discharged near Longwood University in Farmville, Va., Sunday evening.

A shooting in Richmond, Va., sent a man to the hospital Sunday evening. Nikia Mills, 27, and Shenise Miller, 23, were injured by debris from a drive-byshooting in Palmetto, Fla., Sunday morning. An 18-year-old man was shotand wounded in the Foxhurst section of the Bronx, N.Y., Sunday afternoon. A man was shot in the shoulder during an argument between two groups of men in a deli at a mall in Virginia Beach, Va., Sunday afternoon.

A 27-year-old man was shot in the chest multiple times and killed on the west side of Cleveland, Ohio, early Sunday. 25-year-old Kendall Green was found shot to death on the front porch of a home in Glen Burnie, Md., early Sunday. One person was killed and at least one other person was injured after a dispute escalated to gunfire at a Snellville, Ga., home Sunday night.

Police in Portsmouth, Va., found a man shot to death in a 7-Eleven parking lot early Sunday. A man was killed after being shot in the head in North Hollywood, Calif., Sunday afternoon. One person was shot in the face and wounded at a Circle K convenience store in Tangipahoa Parish, La., early Sunday. A man is in critical condition after being shot in the head while driving in Lexington, Ky., Sunday night.

A man was shot in the back on the east side of Saginaw, Mich., Sunday evening. A man and a woman were shot and wounded after an argument near the Georgia Dome in Atlanta, Ga., Sunday afternoon, just before the Falcons’ first regular season home game. A 35-year-old man walked into aBaltimore, Md., hospital with a gunshot wound to the foot early Sunday.

A 24-year-old man was shot multiple times and seriously wounded in southwest Baltimore Sunday evening. A man in his 30s was shot and killed by the boyfriend of the woman he was with in Independence, Mo., early Sunday. 22-year-old Vidal Rodriguez was shot and critically wounded at a party in Austin, Tex., early Sunday. A 46-year-old man suffered a gunshotwound to the leg in Evanston, Ill., early Sunday.

A man showed up at a Hartford, Conn., hospital with a gunshot wound to the calf he sustained at a party early Sunday. A man was found shot to death in a home in Marshalltown, Iowa, early Sunday. A man was arrested forshooting and critically wounding a 16-year-old boy who broke into his car inAlbuquerque, N.M., early Sunday.

Two men, 18 and 34, were injured in a gang-related shooting in South Los Angeles, Calif., early Sunday. A shooting over a girl at a mobile home park sent one man to the hospital in Greenville, N.C., Sunday night. Two people were shot and wounded in a drive-by shooting in southeast Washington, D.C., early Sunday. A man was shot in the foot in a parking lot nearTillman’s Corner, Ala., Sunday evening.

Sidney Thomas, 32, who suffered from mental and physical disabilities, was found lying on a sidewalk dying of a gunshot wound in Shreveport, La., early Sunday. A man and a woman were shot and wounded after they got into an argument with a man about cutting in line at a Subway restaurant inAtlanta, Ga., Sunday afternoon. Two men, 38 and 61, died of gunshotwounds in an apparent murder-suicide near Carencro, La., early Sunday.

A woman was shot in the chest and wounded by her husband during an argument at their residence in Mountain Home, Idaho, early Sunday. Justin Galloway, 31, was shot in the leg outside JoJo’s Famous Chili Dogs inToledo, Ohio, early Sunday. At around the same time in Toledo, an 18-year-old man walked into a store and told a clerk he’d been shot. A man was hospitalized after being shot in the arm in Peoria, Ill., early Sunday.

According to Slate’s gun-death tracker, an estimated 8,145 people have died as a result of gun violence in America since the Newtown massacre on December 14, 2012.

How Many Died Today?

Twenty years ago, the Congress of the United States sentenced thousands of its citizens to death. They attacked research on firearm deaths and injuries.  They attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for funding firearm research.  And to drive the nail home, the CDC saw $2.6 million stripped from its budget. Coincidentally, that is the same amount they had spent on firearms research the previous year.  Because there has been so little scientific research on firearms done, it has been impossible to enact measures to reduce the incidence of death and injury.  How many lives might have been saved had this action not been taken?  We will never know.

Joe Nocera, writing in an Op Ed piece for The New York Times, states that Slate's gun-death tally, which is included at the end of each of his blog posts, has recorded 7,897 deaths since the Newtown massacre last December-almost three times the total killed on Sept. 11, and nearly double the number of U.S. soldiers killed over the course of the nine-year-long Iraq War.

As astonishing as that number is, there is a glaring disparity between the C.D.C figures (they are still allowed to report death records) and Slate's running total.  The reason, Slate has explained, is that its tally is culled from news reports, and the C.D.C figures are taken from death records. "Using the most recent CDC estimates. . .it is likely that as of today, 9/5/2013, roughly 23,381 people have died from guns in the United States since the Newtown shootings.  Compare that number of deaths reported in the news and you can see how under-told the story of gun violence in America really is. "

Here is the gun report for September 6, 2013:

A 2 month old in Minneapolis, a 6 month old shot by her 3 year old brother in Charlston, S.C., a 12 year old boy shot by his 15 year old cousin in New Mexico, a 14 year old boy in Newark, N.J., a 16 year old and another man in one shooting in Philadelphia, 4 people in Charlotte, N.C., a 72 year old woman in Longmont, Colorado, a 26 year old woman in Tennessee, a passenger on a bus shot by another passenger in Houston, Texas, a 29 year old man in Austin, Texas, a man in his 20s in Chicago, a 33 year old and a 44 year old in a murder-suicide in Minnesota, a 38 year old man in Yakima, Washington, a man in Boston, Massachusetts, a 36 year old man in Rochester, NY, a man in Tallahassee, Fl, a 19 year old in Toledo, Ohio, a man in North Kansas City, MO, a man in Houston, Texas, a 55 year old man and a 20 year old man in Elkhart, Indiana, a 21 year old in Portage, Wisconsin.

These were real people, folks.