1,592 people were shot between August 1, 2019, and August 12, 2019 in America.
As I write this, I am watching coverage of the active shooter situation in North Philadelphia. They just updated the people shot up to 6 police officers. They are figuring they may be more at the time of this writing.
It has been a week and a half since the mass killings in El Paso and Dayton. As usual, the country has largely moved on. I hope some action will be taken, but this is starting to feel like all the other tragedies that should spur our nation to action, but doesn’t.
Since we don’t act, then it can only be assumed we find the deaths and injuries from gun violence in this country to be acceptable losses.
I know the politics of the situation, I get why legislation does not move and it is disturbing that our government has become so unresponsive to our cries for change. It remains, until we act as a nation until we stop just moving on to the fresh outrage, until we stop allowing these tragedies to fade away into our collective memory hole to rarely be examined, the casualties of gun violence are just acceptable losses to us as a society.
Lot’s of work has been done to track gun violence in this country. gunviolencearchive.org is a tremendous resource for understanding the level of the crisis we face.
Maybe our culture turns our back so quickly because these mass shooting events have made us numb. Maybe it is because we don’t ever really grasp the totality of the problem.
One of the things I always note is we focus on the deaths alone. Just listening to the news coverage, the reporter was actually a touch dismissive, noting that the 6 officers known to be shot are only wounded. That is how jaded we are when we dismiss someone who got shot, but not killed. There is no ill will meant by that cursory treatment with the statement “just wounded” it is that it is to freaking normal an occurrence in our culture.
I had a friend who was accidentally shot in the chest when she was over at a friends house and they got into dad’s gun cabinet. Her friend was joking around, did not know it was loaded, and pulled the trigger. This event occurred in 1987, 32 years ago now. She survived (thank goodness, otherwise I would have never met this wonderful human) but she was still dealing with the physical injury on a near-daily basis when I met her back in 2005. The emotional trauma probably still runs even deeper than that for her to this day.
With that in mind and some personal shame for being in a society that tolerates these daily tragedies in America, I decided to start compiling the data from gunviolencearchive.org to include daily counts of the casualties of gun violence.
I follow a pretty simple format. I list the number of incidents, per day, note the total number people shot, per day and list if the people shot are wounded (that trauma never leaves a person, they are wounded by gun violence for life) or dead. I started a blog to track this daily.
Acceptable Losses: a daily count of the casualties of gun violence in America
i also put together this series of tweets earlier today that groups all of the day to day casualty counts into one thread for the first 12 days of August. Here is the parent tweet.
You read that right 1,592 people were shot between August 1, 2019 and August 12, 2019.
An average day in the first 12 days of August saw 133 people shot every single day. There were 93 people “only wounded” per day and 40 dead….each...and...every...single...day.
Maybe we can start changing the conversation if we focus on the enormity of the crisis and not just the worst case scenarios.
I will be updating this site everyday that I can (I am dealing with some health stuff so I might miss a few days, but I will get caught up when I can. It updates to this FaceBook page each morning
Acceptable Losses: Gun Violence Casualty Counts
Please share the updates to these sites as you can. It is too important to let this fade into the background