A disturbing coda to the figures on gunshot injuries and fatalities that I posted on Saturday.
The post focused on trends in U.S. shootings and how they have increased over the last decade. The post only briefly touched on the enormous scale of the carnage.
If you add the figures together, they indicate that more than one million people were shot in the U.S. in the last decade (2002-11) for which numbers are available. About 310,000 of these shootings were fatal.
One million people exceeds the combined populations of Charlotte and Winston-Salem.
310,000 people exceeds the population of Greensboro.
Put another way, if a service was held to read the names of each of the decade's million-plus U.S. shooting victims, the speakers took just three seconds per name, and the speakers read continuously day and night, it would take more than a month to read the names. While the last decade's victims were being remembered, more than 10,000 additional people in the U.S. would be shot.
