From Joe Nocera's Gun Blog: The kind of sorrow that settles into your bones

After Roger Hartley lost his friend Mark Hummels to gun violence in January, he realized Hummels was the ninth person he knew who’d been killed or injured by a gun. So he posed a question to his Facebook friends: “How many people have you known who’ve been the victims of gun violence? Suicide, accidental, murder. No politics. No judgment. Just a number.”

The responses poured in. Hartley realized that virtually everyone had a number: one, a dozen, twenty. Joe Heim, an articles editor at The Washington Post Magazine, had gone to Berkeley with Hummels, and decided to take the question to various Washingtonians. He found that even the mayor has a number. (Three.)

Aurora Vasquez, whose niece was shot and killed by her boyfriend, counts only one. That is enough.

“Rest assured that this kind of sorrow, it’s the kind of sorrow that quite literally settles into your bones,” she told Heim. “And it never goes away. And nothing is ever the same.”

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