The chilling reality of who is really being killed by guns in America, in one graphic

There are 33,000 gun deaths in the U.S. every year.

(Image credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images)

published 13 July 2016

Over 33,000 people are fatally shot in the United States every year, but other than being recognizably big, that number doesn't exactly mean much. Thanks to a complex new graphic by FiveThirtyEight, though, gun deaths are now a lot easier for someone to contextualize — and hopefully eliminate, as a result.

The graphic crunches numbers from several different sources including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the FBI, the Global Terrorism Database, the University of Minnesota's IPUMS project, and reporting by Mother Jones. It allows users to sort and map fatalities based on factors like cause, gender, age, and race. Some of the results are pretty sobering:

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.