Over One Million People in the U.S. Have Been Killed by Guns in the Past 35 Years

Over one million people have been killed by guns in the U.S. in the past 35 years.

Image via David Yan

Today marks 35 years since John Lennon was shot and killed in New York City. Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, tweeted a picture of the glasses Lennon wore at the time of his death with a caption of the number of people killed by guns in the U.S. since Lennon's death, as she has done before. That number has now risen to 1,100,000 which makes sense considering the rate of mass shootings happening daily in the U.S., 352 shootings in just 336 days of 2015 as of earlier this month. 

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the data, which includes numerical estimates for the two past years. Another alarming statistic, as fact checked by Politifact, is the number of people in the U.S. who have been killed by guns from 1968 until now is higher than the combined casualties in all U.S. wars in history.

The devastating San Bernardino shooting is the latest horror to spark the national debate on gun control. Before that it was the Planned Parenthood shooting in Colorado which Barack Obama addressed saying, "The reporting is routine, my response here at this podium ends up being routine, the conversation in the aftermath of it, we've become numb to this. It cannot be this easy for somebody who wants to inflict harm on other people to get his or her hands on a gun."

It's easy to glaze over numbers and statistics and become "numb" but those were 1,100,000 lives taken away. May we never forget that those people were once more than just numbers. 

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