The death toll of the Texas church shooting is about 7 percent of the town's population

Police investigate a shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas

(Image credit: Suzanne Cordeiro/Getty Images)

last updated 6 November 2017

Local law enforcement have yet to release a firm count of victims of Sunday's deadly mass shooting at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, but most reports indicate about 27 people were killed and nearly as many injured.

Those numbers would be gutting under any circumstances, but the impact of the tragedy will be more sharply felt given the town's tiny size: Sutherland Springs was home to just 362 people as of the 2000 census, The New York Times reports, which means the death toll amounts to about 7 percent of the population.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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