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The Orlando massacre was one of 43 shootings on Sunday

Just before last call on Sunday morning, a gunman opened fire in Orlando Florida’s Pulse nightclub, killing at least 49 people and seriously injuring another 53.

The incident received significant media coverage, and rightfully so: It was the deadliest mass shooting in American history.

What got much less coverage, though, were the 42 other reported shootings that happened yesterday. According to news reports collected by the Gun Violence Archive and Vox, these shootings resulted in an additional 18 deaths and 41 injuries. At least five of those killed were children.

These shootings, albeit more granular, paint a tragic picture of just how common gun violence is in the United States — and how it claims thousands of lives annually, outside of mass shootings.

Zachary Crockett / Vox

Yesterday’s gun violence victims include an entire family in New Mexico and a 13-year-old boy in Baltimore

The 42 shootings that occurred yesterday were spread out over 16 states, from the California coast to the Maine shoreline.

In New Mexico, a man shot and killed his wife and four children, ages 14, 11, 7, and 3. They were found dead in their home by a relative; the shooter, who fled the scene, is still at large.

Seven separate incidents in Chicago left three dead and nine wounded. In one case, two men were shot and killed while sitting on their porch in the South Side of Chicago. They had just attended a funeral for their friend, who was also killed in a shooting.

"He was a decent guy, a good daddy," a friend of one of the men told the Chicago Sun-Times, "but he was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

Flicker (ElCapitanBSC)

On the dark streets of Baltimore, Maryland, a gunman killed a 13-year-old child and a gravely wounded a 21-year-old man. When officers arrived to investigate the scene, a shooter — who had a gun in each hand — opened fire on them.

There were four other shootings in Florida alone on Sunday, two of which resulted in deaths. A man was found dead in his car around 5 am in Tallahassee — the police say he was shot to death — and another man was found dead in his home in Bartow, a small city in central Florida.

The list goes on and on: a 19-year-old killed in Rochester, New York; a 40-year-old man found dead on his lawn in Louisiana; a 25-year-old shot to death in the back seat of a car in Ohio.

And yet it was just an average day of gun violence in America.

36 people die daily from gun violence in the United States

The Orlando shooting was horrific and unprecedented. But in total, yesterday’s death toll was not so far removed from what happens in our country every day of the year.

The Gun Violence Archive’s historical US shooting data shows that gun violence kills or injures an average of 112 people over any given 24-hour period.

Zachary Crockett / Vox

As my colleague German Lopez has noted, this is an issue that goes far beyond what statistics can answer: America’s relationship with guns is deeply steeped in its cultural and foundational history.

But as the Pulse shooting — or the average day of gun violence in America — suggests, something is clearly broken.

You can read more of Vox’s coverage of the Pulse shooting here.


18 charts that explain gun violence in America