What the WaPo’s mass shooting numbers won’t tell you about murders in America

The Washington Post’s Sunday edition printed the name of every mass shooting victim since 1966 in the special section. While the number of victims is meant to be staggering, just a little context changes the big picture.

In a section titled “The Lives Lost,” the newspaper listed 1,196 names of shooting victims along with some descriptions of the shootings and photos of the over 400 people killed between the Sandy Hook massacre and the recent mass killing in Dayton Ohio.

“Eleven hundred ninety-six. That’s the number of names on this page,” a tweet from the paper’s Twitter account reads. “People who were doing ordinary things until they were shot to death by killers bent on mass fatalities.”

More