This Is How We Do It

A little Journalism; a little Community Organization; a little Crowd Sourcing; a little Citizen Participation - pretty soon it starts to add up to that thing we used to call 'democracy'.

Slate has a gizmo that lets you put in start and stop dates to pull up the total reported gun deaths in the US.

Here's a partial screen shot of the chart showing how many Americans have died of gunshots in the 55 days since Newtown:

That's a partial look - it only includes the last coupla weeks, and it only includes the deaths reported by everyday regular people.  And notice that they haven't included the number of dead Americans in the last few days (because it takes a while to gather, confirm and publish the findings).

But the more people who are paying attention, the better the data will be. You can help us draw a more complete picture of gun violence in America. If you know about a gun death in your community that isn’t represented here, please tweet @GunDeaths with a citation. (If you’re not on Twitter, you can email slatedata@gmail.com.) And if you’d like to use this data yourself for your own projects, it’s open. You can download it here.

About 5500 Americans are dead because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.  In 12 years of war, 5,500 dead Americans.

In those same 12 years, here in the US, well over 330,000 Americans have been killed with guns.