The mass shooting tragedies at Columbine High School and at the Aurora theater ended in the loss of 25 innocent lives and continue to drive the debate about gun violence and public policy in Colorado. But those devastating events represent only a tiny fraction of gun deaths in the state. In the 12 years between Columbine and Aurora, 6,258 people died of gunshot wounds in Colorado. I-News at Rocky Mountain PBS – using data from the state health department and the U.S. Census Bureau, thousands of pages of police, coroner and court records, and numerous on-the-ground interviews – developed a sobering portrait of this unremitting gun carnage. The analysis plotted all of those deaths by the census tract where each victim lived. Of the 1,249 census tracts in Colorado, only 80 escaped a gun death during the period of study. Suicides accounted for 76 percent of the 6,258 deaths from guns during the 12 years, while homicides comprised 20 percent. The rest were either accidental, legal shootings by law enforcement or unexplained. Nationally, about 60 percent of gun deaths are suicides. The narrative focuses on one such neighborhood, Colorado’s deadliest, to tell the story of the larger whole. Gun deaths in Colorado are a public health crisis of the first order.
