12 hours of gun violence in America
Mass shootings and lack of gun control in America have been on my mind so I created an infographic to show how large and, unfortunately, common the problem is.
Once I looked at data from the Gun Violence Archive I was surprised at the number of shootings that happen every hour of every day in America.
To emphasize how consistently gun violence occurs I used a clock as a timeline, selected one incident per hour and arranged all 12 occurrences around the clock.
I examined Tuesday, January 26th, 2016 for three reasons:
I think there’s a belief that more violence occurs on weekend days than on weekdays, but I wanted to focus on a typical day so a Tuesday was a better choice than a Saturday or Sunday.
The Gun Violence Archive offers comprehensive data to the public for the previous 72 hours and I was working under a deadline. The 26th was the only full day available when I started gathering timeline items.
By the weekend (my due date) the crime scene investigators had had enough time to gather details on many of the crimes so I was able to include some details in my timeline.