From the Publisher: Jul 17 1989

Nation editor Robert T. Zintl never forgot how LIFE magazine in 1969 drove home the human cost of the Viet Nam War by publishing photographs of 217 of the 242 American servicemen killed in a single week. Today far more Americans die each week from gunfire. Zintl proposed that TIME undertake a project to find out who the victims are and how they die.

The task of getting the information — by canvassing thousands of coroners, police desks and sheriffs’ offices from coast to coast — was logistically awesome. It would have been impossible without TIME’s national reporting network, which includes 62 correspondents in ten bureaus plus more than 200 stringers, or part-time reporters.

The most painful job was approaching grieving relatives for missing information, as well as for photographs of the victims. In many cases, the relatives wanted to keep their sorrow private. In others, paradoxically, they did not want to cooperate with a project that might promote tighter gun laws.

Still, many families and friends supported the broader purpose. St. Louis stringer Staci Kramer obtained photographs from the mothers of two gun victims. “They want the world to know their children are more than statistics,” Kramer explained. The sister of one victim told Chicago’s Beth Austin that although her husband was a member of the National Rifle Association, she thought TIME’s project “could save some lives.” Atlanta stringer Joyce Leviton found that some relatives “wanted to talk for long periods, as if explaining to a stranger would help whatever had gone wrong.” Pursuing a picture of a gang victim in Harlem, stringer John McDonald was “repeatedly warned that I was within earshot of the perpetrators of the shooting.”

The photographs of the victims were assembled and logged by assistant picture editor Richard Boeth. Nation head researcher Ursula Nadasdy de Gallo spent most of nine weeks tracking the information on her computer. “I felt sadness for the wasted lives,” she says, “and eventually an outrage that we allow so much unnecessary carnage by guns to occur.”