While the nation focused its grief on a mass shooting in Oregon on Thursday, guns were ripping apart dozens more lives across the country.
A 5-month-old girl was shot to death while riding in a car with her mother in Cleveland.
A man killed his wife and a good Samaritan then turned his gun on himself in north Florida.
A security guard was allegedly killed by a co-worker in Atlanta.
Teen-aged brothers were gunned down in broad daylight near a busy intersection in Fresno, California.
A suspect in a Georgia shooting killed himself after a three-county car chase.
The list of the Oct. 1 dead goes on and on: murders, suicides, workplace violence, domestic violence, street shootings, and drive-by gunfire.
And there is nothing statistically unusual about it.
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The most recent data from the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2013 an average of 92 people died in the United States each day of firearm-related injuries. Homicides accounted for about a third, and suicides most of the rest. More than twice as many are shot but survive.
“This is happening every single day in forgotten neighborhoods around the country,” President Barack Obama said at a White House press conference Friday. The previous evening, reeling from news of a gunman’s killing of nine people at Umpqua Community College in Oregon, Obama said the nation had become “numb” to gun violence.
NBC News tracked down cases of two-dozen people who died from gun-related injuries on Thursday, the same day as the rampage in Oregon. Their stories portray a tragic, but perhaps typical, day in America.
The victims included 5-month-old Aavielle Wakefield, who was riding in a car with her mother on Cleveland’s east side Thursday night when a bullet, believed to have been shot from a nearby apartment building tore into her chest.
She was the third fatal drive-by shooting of a child in the city in the past month, and her death nearly brought Cleveland Police Chief Calvin Williams to tears. “We will stay on this as long as it takes,” he said. “We want bodies in jail tonight for this crime.”
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Williams said there were no leads yet in the investigation, in which prosecutors announced a $25,000 reward for information that leads to the killer’s conviction. That same night, in Inglis, Florida, Walter Tyson, 57, allegedly opened fire on the lawn of a home, hitting his wife’s boyfriend, Otis Ray Bean, police said. Bean survived. A good Samaritan, 68-year-old Walter Scott Terhune, tried to intervene, and Tyson shot him to death before entering the house and killing his wife, Patricia Tyson. Then the gunman shot himself. Much earlier, during the early morning shift at the Peachtree Tower apartments in the upscale Buckhead neighborhood of Atlanta, security guard Emmanuel Nwankwo, 23, was shot to death in the lobby. A fellow guard, 26-year-old Dexter Harper, was charged in the 5 a.m. killing. Later that morning, in Forsyth, Georgia, police found a man bleeding from several gunshot wounds. They chased the alleged shooter, Milton Terry Bowden, through three counties before forcing his car off the road. Officers then heard a single gunshot; Bowden had committed suicide. Around that time in Fresno, California, a shootout erupted in a busy intersection. Police arrived and found brothers Willie Ford, 19, and Denzel Ford, 18, dying from gunshot wounds. The motive, police said, was a falling out between the brothers and the 19-year-old gunman, who was arrested in a nearby apartment. That’s just a small cross-section of Thursday’s destruction, which also included young men shot dead on streets in Miami, St. Louis and Baton Rouge, Louisiana; a Pittsburgh kidnapping suspect who turned his gun on himself as police closed in on him; a bar fight in Toledo, Ohio; a murder-suicide in Cincinnati; and a suicide at an upstate New York gun range. On Friday, Williams, whose detectives are searching for whoever killed Aavielle Wakefield, urged the people of Cleveland to go beyond anti-violence marches and step forward to help find her killer, and those responsible for two recent drive-bys that claimed children. “It’s hard to stomach that,” Williams said of the deaths. “Because it’s not for any reason that we can come up with. Not for any reason that any sensible person can come up with.” —NBC News’ ML Flynn, Aliza Nadi, and Polly DeFrank contributed to this article, which first appeared on NBCNews.com.
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