Gun violence has become an inescapable facet of American life. While families and communities across the country are regularly torn apart by bullets, the burden isn’t spread equally, particularly when it comes to the daily drumbeat of gun violence. The impact of this crisis varies based on a wide range of demographic characteristics—including age, location, race, and gender—as well as the strength of local gun laws.

Our Gun Violence Data Dashboards project, designed in partnership with Understory, collects and displays available CDC gun death information, allowing researchers, advocates, and anyone else interested in learning more about this uniquely American problem to parse the data by a range of factors.

To learn more about how gun laws affect gun death rates, visit our Annual Gun Law Scorecard. For more top-level data, visit our Gun Violence Statistics page. Have a question about the below dashboards? Review our Methodology page to learn more, or reach out to one of our experts at info@giffords.org.

Over 1 million Americans have been shot in the past decade. Hundreds of thousands have died, and nearly everyone in the United States will know at least one victim of gun violence in their lifetime. Guns are the leading cause of death for kids, and each year there are more mass shootings than days. 

These statistics, infuriating as they are, only tell part of the story of gun violence in America. Studying the crisis through the lenses of manner, year, and demographic characteristics, we can better understand how gun violence infiltrates our communities—and how to best stop it. Use the dashboards below to explore national gun violence data and trends.

In the absence of comprehensive federal gun safety reform, the burden has fallen to the states to tackle gun violence. Some states, like California and New Jersey, have made exceptional progress in recent years, adopting a range of lifesaving gun laws and experiencing lower gun death rates as a result.

But we’re only as strong as our weakest link—and when it comes to gun safety, about half the states earn a failing grade on our Annual Gun Law Scorecard. Illegal guns are easily trafficked from states with weak laws, like Indiana and Arizona, into states with strong laws, like Illinois and California, contributing to gun violence levels. Use the dashboards below to better understand how gun violence rears its head from state to state. 

While statewide data can offer a broad overview of a region’s gun violence problem, it only tells part of the story.

Examining county-level data can showcase the differences between urban and rural areas when it comes to gun violence. For example, rural areas often have higher gun suicide rates, while cities tend to have higher gun homicide rates. 

County data can also allow for comparisons of similar regions in different states, such as Cook County, Illinois (Chicago), and Fulton County, Georgia (Atlanta), in order to help understand the impact of gun laws and other factors. Use the dashboards below to rank, filter, and compare county gun violence levels across the United States.