Colorado Gun Deaths on Pace for Modern Record

Colorado deaths by gun violence had set a record through this time last year. But 2022 is already ahead of that pace – and more than 10 percent of the victims have been children.

Through August 19 in 2021, according to the Gun Memorial website, which offers an online space to remember victims in this state and across the country as “Real people, not just statistics,” at least 103 people in Colorado had been killed by a firearm – the most by far for the first eight months of a year since the website’s birth in 2015.

This mark has already been surpassed in 2022. The 103rd Coloradan to be killed by a gun this year passed away on July 28, and with August 19 still three days away, the toll sits at 108. Of this year’s victims, fifteen were eighteen or younger, including George Weingarten, who was just eight months old when he and his mother, Lizet Salinas-Mijangos, were shot to death by the infant’s father, David Weingarten, in Colorado Springs on February 1.

This scenario is all too common: The overwhelming majority of the 24 females from Colorado included on the Gun Memorial site for 2022 died as a result of domestic violence.

In 2018, Westword profiled Gun Memorial, which had been launched three years earlier by Steve Tarzia, a software engineer based in Chicago. Early on, he decided to include information about every gun death in the country, including homicides, tragic accidents and suicide. “The statistics are quite clear that suicides are much more effective – you’re much more likely to die – if you have a gun,” he explained. “Shots to the head are 98 percent fatal, whereas if you try to overdose, there may only be a 5 or 10 percent chance that you’ll kill yourself. And suicidal thoughts are often temporary and may be related to events. To get a second chance may often mean the difference between life and death, but there aren’t many second chances with guns.”

Of course, not every suicide by gun is publicly disclosed. And the Colorado page of the Gun Memorial site underscores the sad reality that most other firearm deaths receive little media attention.

There are obvious exceptions, including the recent murder of Loveland’s Lindsay Daum, along with her daughter, sixteen-year-old Meadow Sinner, after her request for a protection order against their killer, Javier Acevedo, was denied. But in many instances, homicides receive only passing mention from the press.

To put the death count in perspective, here are the number of Colorado victims calculated by Gun Memorial during the same period for each year since its creation:

2015 through August 19: 50
2016 through August 19: 55
2017 through August 19: 85
2018 through August 19: 73
2019 through August 19: 74
2020 through August 19: 89
2021 through August 19: 103

The gun-death total in Colorado for 2021 landed at 166.

The names of the 108 Colorado victims through August 15, 2022, are listed below in descending chronological order, along with links to their Gun Memorial pages. There, visitors will be able to connect to (frequently brief) news articles about what happened, light virtual candles in memory of victims and read the comments of friends, family members and loved ones, as well as leave remarks of their own.

Real people, not just statistics. Each has a story.