Wednesday, January 9, 2013

At Least 643 Americans Have Been Killed By Guns Since Newtown

Posted By on Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 11:13 AM

Since last year's mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., the anonymous Twitter account @GunDeaths has posted a tweet for every news story they could find of a person who has been killed by a gun in North America, "regardless of cause and without comment."

After the shooting in Newtown, Slate partnered with @GunDeaths to create an interactive map tabulating the locations of each such death—while admitting that the map is "necessarily incomplete."

What they've found, to date, is that at least 643 people in America have been killed by guns since Dec. 14.

We can get pedantic and argumentative about it, as I'm sure some of the folks reading this will: that guns didn't kill people, the bullets killed them, or the person holding the gun killed them. If there were more guns, the victims could have protected themselves. If there were fewer guns, the attacks wouldn't have even happened.

Whatever. The arguments are irrelevant, because 643 people are dead.

Whether or not you blame the gun or the person behind it, the fact remains that firearms were the tools that manufactured those deaths.

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