News Blog

Over the weekend, a fellow City staff member shared a link detailing all of the gun deaths since the Newtown shootings. As of this morning, 321 people have been fatally shot since December 14, says the Slate.com article. (According to the Rochester Police Department, there had been 36 murders in the city in 2012 as of December 19: 26 involved a firearm.)

Slate is working with the anonymous operator of the @GunDeaths Twitter feed. In explaining the partnership, the writer makes a couple of interesting points about the statistical challenges of tracking gun-related deaths:

- The most recent comprehensive gun-death statistics available come from the Centers for Disease Control, and they are for 2008 and 2009. "It seems shocking that when guns are in the headlines every day, there’s no one attempting to create a real-time chronicle of the deaths attributable to guns in the United States," the Slate article says.

- The article also says that its counts don't include suicides, which make up an estimated 60 percent of gun-related deaths.