It’s been a tense and sometimes violent summer in America; there’s no getting around it. President Obama addressed this feeling head-on in a forum moderated by David Muir on ABC , ESPN and Freeform last night. ABC’s late-night news program Nightline has been analyzing different topics that fall under the broad umbrella of race relations each night this week. It culminates tonight in a special report from ABC News’ Pierre Thomas.
Using the resources of ABC’s affiliate stations and the Gun Violence ArchiveIn Shots Fired, Thomas tracks every single shooting in America over an 11-day period, what he finds is that from June 24 – July 4, 2016, there were 1,077 people shot and 509 people killed due to gun violence in the U.S.
“The results are disturbing, to say the least,” Thomas tells TVNewser. “The violence goes well beyond the headlines and it affects a wide variety of people, from a wide variety of places – and not just from the inner city.”
Thomas heads to Chicago and Baltimore speaking with families of victims, going on a ride-along with officers, and embedding with a so-called nightcrawler armed with a police scanner and video camera.
“We’ve been working on this project for several months and given the recent events in Orlando and Dallas, the project underscores the fact that carnage of this magnitude is happening on America’s streets every day,” says Thomas. “The goal is to have people look at what’s actually happening in this country, understand it, and consider what it means for all of us.”