More than 25,000 people killed in gun violence so far in 2023

More than half of all gun violence deaths this year were deaths by suicide.

By Kiara Alfonseca

On August 3, 2023

Shootings have continuously made headlines just seven months into the year.

As of Aug. 1, at least 25,198 people have died from gun violence in the U.S. this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive – which is an average of roughly 118 deaths each day.

Of those who died, 879 were teens and 170 were children.

Deaths by suicide have made up the vast majority of gun violence deaths this year. There’s been more than 14,000 deaths by gun suicide this year, an average of about 66 deaths by suicide per day in 2023.

The majority of these deaths have occurred in Texas, California, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Illinois and Louisiana.

The grim tally of gun violence deaths includes 488 people killed in police officer-involved shootings. Thirty-four police officers have been fatally shot in the line of duty this year.

There have also been 960 “unintentional” shootings, the Gun Violence Archive shows.

There have been more than 420 mass shootings in 2023 so far, which is defined by the Gun Violence Archive as an incident in which four or more victims are shot or killed. These mass shootings have led to 465 deaths and 1,781 injuries.

There have been at least 20 K-12 school shootings so far this year, including a March 27 incident at The Covenant School, a Christian school for students in preschool through sixth grade in Nashville, Tennessee, where three children and three staff members were shot and killed.

In Michigan, three students were killed and five others were injured when a gunman opened fire at two locations on Michigan State University’s main campus in East Lansing on Feb. 13, police said.

California saw three mass shootings in a matter of days in January, with one shooting leaving at least 11 people killed and 10 others injured after a gunman opened fire at a dance studio near a Lunar New Year celebration in Monterey Park, California.

The U.S. has surpassed 39,000 deaths from gun violence per year since 2014, according to data from Gun Violence Archive. Still, gun deaths are down from 2016, 2017 and 2018, when the total number of deaths each year surpassed 50,000. There were 44,310 such deaths in 2022.

Last June, President Joe Biden signed into law a gun safety package passed by Congress. It was the first gun reform bill from Congress in decades.

But advocates for gun reform continue to push for tougher measures. Florida lawmakers Rep. Jared Moskowitz and Rep. Maxwell Frost spoke with “GMA3” this month to mark the fifth anniversary of the tragic shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and called on Congress to do more to curb gun violence.

“Five years later, we feel like we’ve made some progress and then we were reminded that nothing has changed,” Moskowitz said.

This piece was republished from ABC News.