By Graeme MacKay, The Hamilton Spectator – Thursday, January 17, 2013
How Many People Have Been Killed by Guns Since Newtown?
Slate partners with @GunDeaths for an interactive, crowdsourced tally of the toll firearms have taken since Dec. 14.
The answer to the simple question in that headline is surprisingly hard to come by. So Slate is collecting data for our crowdsourced interactive. This data is necessarily incomplete (click here to see why, and to learn more about @GunDeaths, the Twitter user who helped us create this interactive). But the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn’t represented here, please email a link to a news report to slatedata@gmail.com. And if you’d like to use this data yourself for your own projects, it’s open. You can download it here.
Update, June 19, 2013: As time goes on, our count gets further and further away from the likely actual number of gun deaths in America—because roughly 60 percent of deaths by gun are due to suicides, which are very rarely reported. When discussing this issue, please note that our number is by design not accurate and represents only the number of gun deaths that the media can find out about contemporaneously. Part of the purpose of this interactive is to point out how difficult it is to get accurate real-time numbers on this issue.
Using the most recent CDC estimates for yearly deaths by guns in the United States, it is likely that as of today, 10/4/2013, roughly 26,278 people have died from guns in the U.S. since the Newtown shootings. Compare that number to the number of deaths reported in the news in our interactive below, and you can see how undertold the story of gun violence in America actually is. (Source: Slate)