Last week, in an effort to force legislative action on gun control, Sen. Chris Murphy staged a 15-hour filibuster on the Senate floor. It lasted from 11 am, Wednesday, through 2 am the following morning, eventually ending with the GOP agreeing to vote on a gun control bill.
48 people were shot during a 15-hour filibuster on gun control
As politicians recounted stories of gun violence before the Senate, there were 38 shootings that killed 12 people and injured 36 more across America.
Zachary Crockett / Vox
The shootings began as soon as Murphy took the floor, shortly after 11 am.
Around that time, a man walked into a medical office in eastern Washington, shot his chiropractor to death, and then killed himself.
Moments later, in Cottontown, Tennessee, two men were gunned down in an apparent home intrusion.
“When the neighbor heard gun shots ... she didn’t think anything about it because the neighbor was a gun person and liked to shoot,” a sheriff told the local news.
While Murphy and other senators were on the Hill eulogizing those killed in the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando Sunday, 13 people were shot in Chicago over the span of several hours — including a young man who was killed while recording a Facebook Live video on the street.
Two women mourn in Las Vegas after a Wednesday shooting.
Around 1 pm in Las Vegas, a 20-year-old man was shot in the head. Neighbors were frightened by the incident, including a little boy. “I want to take my son to the pool today but he’s too scared,” his mother told reporters.
As the filibuster stretched into its penultimate hour — and while Murphy was delivering a moving tribute to a child killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012 — three young men in Detroit were barraged by 30 bullets in a drive-by. Only one of them survived, and he is in critical condition.
By the end of the 15-hour filibuster, 48 people had been injured or killed in 38 shootings across 21 states.
During the filibuster, there was a shooting every 23 minutes
Earlier this week, we reported that on the same day of the Orlando massacre — the largest mass shooting in US history — there were 42 other shootings across the country.
Using data from the Gun Violence Archive and Vox, we pieced together a timeline of the reported shootings that occurred in America during the filibuster. (Note: Some news stories did not include specific times; in these cases, we made estimates based on the time of the report.)
Below, we screen-capped the approximate moment from the filibuster at which each shooting occurred.
According to Gun Violence Archive data, an average of 36 people are killed by guns every day in America. A Vox analysis revealed that 1,065 Americans have been killed in mass shootings since January 2013 alone — and that only includes incidents involving four or more people, not the myriad of much smaller gun deaths that occur every day.
The filibuster was a call to action — a response to what many Americans feel has been political inaction.
“The failure of this body to do anything — anything at all — in the face of that continued slaughter isn’t just painful to us, it’s unconscionable,” Sen. Murphy said on the floor.
And as he stood, decrying America’s gun violence problem, 48 people were shot.
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