Credits 
 
 Graphic by Katie Park and Laura Stanton 
 
 Research and reporting by Greg Jaffe, Julie Tate and Jennifer Jenkins 
 
 Images via family photos and the Arizona Republic 
 
 About this data 
 
 The victims in this dataset are children aged 10 and under who were killed in deliberate shootings in the United States in 2012. The analysis was done by a search of news databases, federal crime statistics and Web sites that track violence against children. There may be other shootings that went unreported by local media. 
 
 Correction: A previous version of this graphic incorrectly stated the proportion of children killed in their own home as more than half, rather than nearly half. ||||| Taken together, the killings reflect some of the country’s most unyielding problems. Mental illness, so central to the Newtown killings, also played a role in more than half of the other 71. Stray bullets from neighborhood gun battles or drive-by shootings killed 22 children. Drugs, typically methamphetamine, were a factor in six others. Perhaps most striking was how many of the children knew their killers. Seventeen were shot by their mothers, according to police; another 17 by their fathers. 
 
 Like Newtown, every one of these killings has provoked a special kind of despair among the survivors — parents, relatives, friends, neighbors, police officers, teachers, pastors. And as in Newtown, all of these people have continued to mourn, regret, reflect on and agonize over the deaths as their first anniversaries have come and gone. 
 
 “What I experienced, I’ll never move on from it,” said one of the parents, Carlton Stringer Sr., who discovered the body of his 6-month-old son on the morning of Jan. 15, allegedly shot by a friend of one of the other victims. “I was crying, screaming and scared,” he said. “The police told me to go to counseling. But that won’t help. It is always going to play in my head. It is something I got to live with for the rest of my life.” 
 
 In all, four children were deliberately shot to death in January. In February came another six. One was Chaniya Wynn of Cleveland. The 1-year-old girl and her mother were killed in an abandoned garage by the mother’s ex-boyfriend, who then killed himself. 
 
 Chaniya’s aunt, Cherie Jackson, remembers arriving at the garage just as the police and coroner were leaving. She came with 10 cans of spray paint. “I wanted it to look like they were loved,” she said. 
 
 “RIP my baby sister. RIP my baby niece,” she spray-painted on the garage. “I love you so much.” 
 
 She stepped back. Soon others were grabbing spray-paint cans. First they covered the outside walls of the garage and then the inside. The windowless building stood for a year before the local neighborhood association flattened it. “Too many bad memories,” Jackson says of the building. “Now it is just a patch of dirt.”
– The 20 children shot to death inside Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown last year account for only about a fifth of the young kids fatally shot in 2012, according to a Washington Post analysis. The survey finds that 91 children age 10 or younger were killed in deliberate shootings during the year. Of note: Mental illness played a role in two-thirds of the cases (including Newtown), stray bullets killed 22, and drugs had some connection in six deaths. Seventeen of the kids were killed by their mother and another 17 by their father. More than half were killed in their own home or in the home of a relative. The Post has a list of the young victims and more details in a graphic here.