7 Deadly Days

They are the commonplace tragedies that occur every day in communities across the U.S. The smoldering anger between a husband and wife ignites and ends with a pistol shot. The suffocating weight of depression vanishes, with gunfire, into the imagined peace of death. A hunting trip turns tragic, and a family is destroyed. The stupidity of playing with a loaded weapon leaves a young boy dead. The momentary incivility of a pair of barroom brawlers results in bloody death.

Events like these happen so often that Americans' sense of horror and outrage has been numbed. Death by gunfire has become nearly as banal in the U.S. as auto fatalities; shootings are so routine that they are sometimes ignored by the local news. Only by coming face to face with the needless victims does the wastefulness sink in.

And while the country is numb, the families and friends the dead leave behind are surely not. At any one time, the nation harbors a large tribe of those crying and struggling with the loss a gun has caused.

The 464 people whose deaths are cited in these 28 pages are victims of an American epidemic: they were all shot in a single week, from May 1 to 7. This year more than 30,000 others will share their fate.

If the U.S. were losing this many people to a killer virus or to a war, there would be a public outcry. Yet more Americans die of gunshot wounds every two years than have died to date of AIDS. Similarly, guns take more American lives in two years than did the entire Viet Nam War. Only automobile accidents (total deaths per year: 48,700) surpass shootings as the leading cause of injury-induced fatalities. But while auto safety is a continuing public preoccupation, most Americans seem inexplicably indifferent to guns or unwilling to do much about them.

Deaths by guns tend to be isolated, infrequent in any one community and seemingly random in their dispersion. The inanimate numbers, no matter how often they are repeated, cannot convey the heartbreaking stories that lurk within them. To attach faces to the statistics and find out where and how so many die, TIME has attempted to record every gunshot death in the U.S. in one full week. The victims on the following pages range in age from 2 to 87; they are black and white, Asian and Hispanic; they represent 42 states. The portraits are arranged day by day, and in alphabetical order by the state in which the shootings occurred. The information about the deaths comes from various official sources -- police and coroners -- and in some cases from families of the victims.

The pattern in these 464 deaths is depressingly clear: guns most often kill the people who own them or people whom the owners know well. Despite the outcry over street gangs and drug dealers, the week's homicides typically involved people who loved, or hated, each other -- spouses, relatives or close acquaintances. Only 14 deaths were in self-defense. Just 13 involved law- enforcement officers; no on-duty police officer was killed during the week. And despite the current controversy over military-style assault rifles, most of the killing took place with ordinary pistols, shotguns and hunting rifles.