In the weeks since the December 14, 2012, massacre of 20 children and six adults in Newtown, Connecticut, gun violence in America has been among the media’s most-covered topics. TakePart went online to determine which towns in the U.S. report gun homicides by the dozens every year.
For all the attention lavished on assault weapons by politicians and pundits, FBI statistics indicate that of 46,313 firearm murders in the United States between 2007 and 2011, handguns were used in 33,034. Guns small enough to conceal in your pockets were the weapons of choice in 71 percent of these deaths.
Since we are only one month into 2013, not every city has published its final 2012 gun homicide counts—but we went after the most credible numbers available.
Factoring in cities with populations greater than 350,000 people, and using the most uniform population data available, TakePart’s rankings are based on the number of gun homicides per 100,000 people in the city.
For instance, New York, with a population of more than eight million, had 237 people killed by guns in 2012, for a rate of 2.9 gun homicides per 100,000 people.
Click through the gallery to see which American cities suffered the most from the gun violence epidemic in the past year, per 100,000 people.
Photo: Margarito Perez/Reuters
