The Thousand Dead Since the Newtown Massacre

Many victims have been killed with firearms since the Sandy Hook school massacre.

The long series of icons representing people starts with the smallest, at the bottom of the web page, which represent children (the other, larger ones represent adults): A click opens a new window and you see the name of Grace McDonnell, seven years old, who died in Newtown, Connecticut. Move your computer’s mouse on to the next icon, and open the corresponding window to search for the name of another of the Sandy Hook School victims.

And if we keep going, up along the left margin of the page, we read the names of all those who died in the massacre, and after that first event, the one that happened on Dec. 14, 2012, the rows wind upward tallying all the days on the calendar that have passed since that day. And there is not one day without one or more people dead, killed by firearms, in the United States. At the end of the account there are 916 — almost 1,000 people dead in less than a month.

Slate magazine hosts this sad statistic, but it is also an impressive statistic when you consider the debate that has come about over gun control since Newtown. This idea did not come from the editorial staff, but from an “anonymous” Twitter user (as the site explains) who opened an account after the massacre in Aurora last July. He wanted to count the number of deaths daily, collecting information via the web.

It is not an easy task, seeing that the ability to conduct this kind of count is a major problem even for important organizations such as the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Yet, although the information is incomplete, it is not inaccurate. This statistic is certainly one of the most effective proofs (if proof were ever needed) to demonstrate how dramatic this phenomenon is in the United States.