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As we get closer to June you might see a lot more public figures posting the hashtag #WearOrange to their social media accounts. June 2nd is National Gun Violence Awareness day, and dressing in orange has become a signifier of the movement to end gun violence ever since a group of Chicago teens asked people in their community to wear the color in honor of a friend who had been shot and killed in a park near their high school.
The victim was 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton, and her friends wanted to honor her with orange because it is the cautionary color hunters wear to protect themselves from friendly fire in the woods. That act of remembrance happened in 2013, and since then Wear Orange has become a movement, with a lot of celebrity backing. Sarah Silverman, Amy Schumer, Susan Sarandon, Russell Simmons, Jason Bateman and many more have all pledged to wear orange.
Another member of that collective is Julianne Moore, who is a council member for the group Everytown for Gun Safety, which sprung out of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Moore has also written an essay for Lena Dunham’s Lenny Letter about the need for better gun control measures, and appeared in a video called “We Can End Gun Violence” with President Obama, a host of other celebrities, and survivors and family members of shooting incidents across the country.
We may live with a lingering fear of terror in the backs of our minds, but as the above visualization shows, the number of Americans who die every year from guns vastly outpaces victims of terrorist attacks.
Data Sources: https://www.vox.com/2015/10/1/9437187/obama-guns-terrorism-deaths (using numbers from the State Department, the Justice Department, and the Council on Foreign Relations’ Micah Zenko)
Music: Emancipator – Shook (Mobb Deep/Sigur Ros)
Written and Produced by: Gabriel Reilich
Graphics by: Jake Infusino
