RÄ{01245 Å ««NATION, Page 30COVER STORY: 7 Deadly DaysIn one ordinary week, 464 people died in America's continuingepidemic of gunfire. On the following pages are their stories.
They are the commonplace tragedies that occur every day in
communities across the U.S. The smoldering anger between a husband
and wife ignites and ends with a pistol shot. The suffocating
weight of depression vanishes, with gunfire, into the imagined
peace of death. A hunting trip turns tragic, and a family is
destroyed. The stupidity of playing with a loaded weapon leaves a
young boy dead. The momentary incivility of a pair of barroom
brawlers results in bloody death.
Events like these happen so often that Americans' sense of
horror and outrage has been numbed. Death by gunfire has become
nearly as banal in the U.S. as auto fatalities; shootings are so
routine that they are sometimes ignored by the local news. Only by
coming face to face with the needless victims does the wastefulness
sink in.
And while the country is numb, the families and friends the
dead leave behind are surely not. At any one time, the nation
harbors a large tribe of those crying and struggling with the loss
a gun has caused.
From May 1 to 7, 464 people were victims of an American epidemic;
they were all shot in a single week. This year more than 30,000
others will share their fate.
If the U.S. were losing this many people to a killer virus or
to a war, there would be a public outcry. Yet more Americans die
of gunshot wounds every two years than have died to date of AIDS.
Similarly, guns take more American lives in two years than did the
entire Viet Nam War. Only automobile accidents (total deaths per
year: 48,700) surpass shootings as the leading cause of
injury-induced fatalities. But while auto safety is a continuing
public preoccupation, most Americans seem inexplicably indifferent
to guns or unwilling to do much about them.
Deaths by guns tend to be isolated, infrequent in any one
community and seemingly random in their dispersion. The inanimate
numbers, no matter how often they are repeated, cannot convey the
heartbreaking stories that lurk within them. To attach faces to the
statistics and find out where and how so many die, TIME has
attempted to record every gunshot death in the U.S. in one full
week. The victims on the following pages range in age from 2 to 87;
they are black and white, Asian and Hispanic; they represent 42
states. The portraits are arranged day by day, and in alphabetical
order by the state in which the shootings occurred. The information
about the deaths comes from various official sources -- police and
coroners -- and in some cases from families of the victims.
The pattern in these 464 deaths is depressingly clear: guns
most often kill the people who own them or people whom the owners
know well. Despite the outcry over street gangs and drug dealers,
the week's homicides typically involved people who loved, or hated,
each other -- spouses, relatives or close acquaintances. Only 14
deaths were in self-defense. Just 13 involved law-enforcement
officers; no on-duty police officer was killed during the week. And
despite the current controversy over military-style assault rifles,
most of the killing took place with ordinary pistols, shotguns and
hunting rifles.
Instead of highlighting mayhem on the streets, the week of May
1 through 7 was a chronicle of private despair. The victims were
frequently those most vulnerable in society: the poor, the young,
the abandoned, the ill and the elderly. The most common single
cause of death was suicide. People in the grip of despondency or
disease who turned their weapons on themselves accounted for 216
deaths, nearly half the total; compounding the tragedy, nine
suicides turned their rage outward, first killing someone else,
including spouses or other relatives. Another 22 deaths were
preventable accidents, often the result of a thoughtless few
seconds of play with a supposedly unloaded firearm.
Even when a shooting involved a deadly collision of strangers,
the provocation was only occasionally a dispute over drugs or
gangland territory. Equally prevalent were fights at bars, robbery
attempts and random shootings with no apparent intention to kill.
In many instances, the fact that a gun was readily at hand at a
critical moment produced what Karole Avila, a psychiatrist at
Detroit Receiving Hospital, has called a permanent solution to a
temporary problem.
It is of little comfort that, statistically, the situation has
actually improved slightly in this decade. While gunshot deaths
have roughly doubled since 1938, they dropped from 14.8 per 100,000
population in 1980 to 13.7 in 1986, the last year for which
complete figures are available. One important reason is that the
baby boomers are getting older, and the most probable criminal
offenders are those between 18 and 24. Better emergency medical
treatment is also keeping more victims alive: five times as many
people are wounded as are killed by gunshots.
Some will continue to argue that it is people, not guns, who
kill people. But the pervasiveness of gun ownership in America --
one in every other household -- is relevant. A gun assault is far
more likely to prove fatal than an attack with a knife. Suicide by
gun is more certain to succeed than by other methods. Many of the
464 people who died in that first week of May would still be alive
today were it not for the convenient presence of a gun.
It is not easy to look at the faces on the following pages.
There are anger and disgust at the brutality, sorrow for the young
lives snuffed out, pity and sympathy for those who could find no
other way to lift the burdens of life.
But in the end, there is a sense of embarrassment, even shame.
How can America think of itself as a civilized society when day
after day the bodies pile up amid the primitive crackle of gunfire
