The number of 16- and 17-year-old drivers who died in traffic accidents rose significantly in the first half of 2012, creeping back toward what traffic safety experts called "unacceptable" levels, according to research published Tuesday.

The report — a preliminary compilation of data from all 50 states and the District of Columbia by the Governors Highway Safety Association — found that 240 16- and 17-year-olds died behind the wheel from January through June 2012. That's a 19 percent increase over the same period in 2011 and a startling 26 percent more than in the first half of 2010.

It also outpaces the rise in overall traffic deaths last year, which increased by 5 percent, the National Safety Council reported last week.

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The report identified no single overarching reason teen mortality jumped. Instead, it theorizes that two-decade-old state regulations on the youngest drivers haven't kept up with the teen driving population, which has been given more reasons to drive by the improving economy. And like numerous other traffic safety groups, the governors association warned of the distractions posed by cellphones and other electronics.

"We know from research and experience that teen drivers are not only a danger to themselves, but also a danger to others on the roadways," said Kendall Poole, chairman of the governors' safety organization and director of the Tennessee Governor's Highway Safety Office.

The rise in deaths last year is "unacceptable," he said.

Separate data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, or NHTSA, peg traffic accidents as the single biggest killer of U.S. teens, accounting for more than third of all deaths among Americans 15 to 20 years old.

Read the full report, including state-by-state data (.pdf)

Until 2011, the number of deaths among beginning drivers had been falling since 2002, when it hit a modern annual record of 544. That was roughly a decade after states began adopting so-called graduated driver licensing laws, which impose restrictions on the youngest drivers in stages as they approach age 18. 

All 50 states now have such laws, and increases in deaths over the last two years could simply reflect officials' and parents' letting their guard down as the laws have become a part of everyday life, said Allan Williams, former chief scientist for the National Highway Traffic Safety Institute, who conducted the study.

The improving economy may also be an incentive for more teenagers to drive, statistically increasing their risk, Williams said.

Whatever the reason, "based on 2011 final data and the early look at 2012, it appears that we are headed the wrong direction," he said.

The report called on states to renew their focus on graduated driving laws and to establish programs to help parents keep their children safe.

"Parents have a huge responsibility to ensure safe teen driving behavior," said Barbara Harsha, executive director the governors group. "States can facilitate this by providing innovative programs that bring parents and teens together around this issue."

The NHTSA has proposed new federal grants to help states fine-tune and enforce their graduated driver laws. To qualify for the money, states would have to require new drivers to go through a learner's permit stage and an intermediate permit stage before they could get full licenses.

Public comment on the proposals closes April 23.

The proposals closely mirror a three-part program to restrict beginning drivers recommended by the governors safety group. That template calls for:

• A learner's permit beginning no earlier than age 16, lasting at least six months and requiring 30 to 50 hours of parent-certified supervision.
• An intermediate stage lasting at least until age 18, including a ban on driving after 9 or 10 p.m., with a limit of one teen passenger.
• A ban on all cellphones and other electronic devices.

"Our main goal is to save lives," said Jeff Bledsoe, sheriff of Dickson County, Tenn., whose state has already put most of those ideas in place.

Dickson especially stressed the ban on electronics behind the wheel, telling NBC station WSMV of Nashville: "With all of the technology we have these days — with cell phones and other items in the vehicle that could take our focus off the roadway — we have to be cautious and know what a huge responsibility it is when we operate a vehicle."

Related

National Safety Council: Traffic deaths surged in 2012

Red state, blue state divide reflected in fatal traffic accidents

Authorities could go even further in West Virginia, where a measure was introduced in the state House last week to require beginning drivers to pass drug tests — three of them, once before they could get a learner's permit, again before they could step up to an intermediate license and one last time before they could get a full license.

"Obviously, any time you can take an opportunity to try and eliminate drugs — and especially in driving — that's obviously a good thing," said Bernie Buttrey, a driver's education instructor in Parkersburg, W.Va.

Buttrey told NBC station WTAP of Parkersburg that he was hesitant because of the constitutional implications, but he said such tests may be reasonable to ensure that beginning teenage drivers remain safe.

"We've passed laws that some people think maybe are excessive in the use of your cellphones, but I think evidence proves that the less you use your cellphone, the less you're distracted," he said. "So this is just maybe another step in the right direction."

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Theirs are the faces behind the numbers. A hard-working college student shot in her prized car. A fun-loving 2-year-old accidentally shot by his brother. An aging rocker killed for a thousand bucks.

As part of a special NBC News report, “Flashpoint: Guns in America,” NBCNews.com catalogued 91 shooting deaths across the country between Jan. 19 and 21, the weekend the nation marked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and ushered a president into his second term. While not a statistically valid sample, the snapshot of gun violence in America is intended to illuminate both the magnitude of the problem and the personal toll such violence inflicts at a time of national debate about gun rights and gun control in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.

The victims we found died during robberies, after arguments, in moments of despair. They were killed by loved ones, by strangers, by their own hand. Each story, in its own way, is heartbreaking. As the country awaits President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, we share a handful of them here:

Rebecca Foley worked as a babysitter, office clerk and cater-waiter to put herself through college, and she scraped and saved to make her first big purchase: a 2006 cherry-red Volkswagen Beetle. The 21-year-old business student adored tooling around Savannah, Ga., with the windows down.

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On the evening of Jan. 21, she was driving home with her boyfriend of a year following behind in his own car after getting his nails painted because he lost a bet with her, police said. He got caught up in traffic and so she was alone as she piloted the car into her apartment complex’s parking lot, past the live oak trees and hanging moss, toward her tidy garden-level unit.

What happened next is a mystery, but the boyfriend told police that when he finally caught up, he found the little red car stopped at a bizarre angle and Foley slumped over the steering wheel. She had been shot, apparently while the car was still moving, and would be dead within minutes. The rear, driver-side window was shattered by a single bullet that left a hole the size of a 50-cent piece. No arrests have been made, despite a $6,000 reward, and the motive is unknown.

To family and friends, Foley’s violent end still seems unreal.

“She never was around anybody who would put her in a bad situation. She never had any enemies,” said Alixandra Scalia, 20, a former roommate.

Friends and family members use almost identical language to describe Foley, calling her a beautiful, hard-working young woman who was determined to put old family troubles behind her and realize her goal of a degree, grad school and a good job in the risk-management industry.

Born in Charlotte, N.C., and raised in rural Virginia and Georgia by her divorced mom, Foley played the violin at 4 but didn’t read until second grade, after she was diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder. She had a rocky relationship with her mother, Jennifer, and moved out when she was 17.

“She said, ‘I can’t live under your roof and I won’t.’ But she graduated high school, which doesn’t always happen in these cases, and she went on to college,” her mother told NBC News.

She bounced between several colleges and overcame academic setbacks before enrolling full-time at Savannah State University, where she hit her stride. Her mother said she “worked her butt off” to stay on track, and one of her professors wrote that she was a “joy to work with.”

She would rise at 4:30 some mornings to fit in work in a local insurance office before school. She kept her credit score on a Post-it note and cooked dinner with a friend every night to save money.

At Christmas, she splurged a little on her “very first cruise” to the Bahamas, said one of her bosses, insurance agent Mitchell Bush. She dreamed of buying a fixer-upper on Tybee Island, an island town near Savannah.

“We had just talked about that on Sunday -- and Monday she was dead,” said her grandmother, Lois Fowler.

The night of the shooting, Foley’s two roommates were in the apartment when they heard her boyfriend banging on the door.

“He was just saying, ‘Rebecca’s been shot and just kept repeating that,’” said Abbey Bernal, 22. “Medics tried to resuscitate her, and it was too late. I just saw them pull the sheet over her head.”

Friends and family said they can’t believe they won’t see Foley’s flashing blue eyes and big smile again. They remember how she loved cream of potato soup, wore SpongeBob slippers and doted on her Shih-Tzu named Zoe.

Foley’s mother said she and her daughter had grown closer in recent months and that Rebecca had called the day she was killed to ask what dishes would go well with a pork roast.

And there was another conversation she remembered.

“She called me not six months ago and said she had a dream that she was going to die young,” her mother said. “I told her, ‘I don’t think that’s true. I hope that’s not true.’”

******

Family members say they’ll remember 2-year-old Travin Varise for how his chubby face would break into the sweetest smile, how excited he got every time “Finding Nemo” came on, how he went after a drumstick with gusto.

And how he loved his big brother, Terrance.

“Terrance growed his little brother up,” his aunt, Juanita, said. “Before my sister knew who the baby’s father was, he raised him up like it was his son.”

That’s why, the family says, it’s tragic that Terrance, 18, is now locked up, charged with accidentally killing the toddler while playing with a friend’s .357 Magnum at their Baton Rouge, La., home. He has not yet entered a plea.

“It’s so hard,” said the boys’ mother, Yarnell.

She was crying, but her voice took on an edge as she complained she had not been able to visit her eldest child because the jail is too far away. “I want him to know it’s going to be all right. I know he didn’t do it on purpose,” she said.

Terrance was on probation after pleading guilty to burglary in May, but his mother said he was a “good dude” who had matured since then. His aunt said he didn’t carry a weapon – “We don’t allow guns in the house” – but had been hanging out with “the wrong crowd.”

Terrance’s Facebook page, however, suggests an interest in guns. There’s a photo of a small arsenal laid out on a plaid bedspread, another where he is holding a silver revolver at his side, a third where he appears to be dangling a shotgun from one finger.

East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore says he sees pictures like that all the time after a young person is arrested for a violent crime.

“Do you know where your guns are? Because young kids play with guns and bad things happen sometimes,” he said. “I think it’s video games and stuff – no one really dies and everyone wakes up the next morning. There’s a whole culture of kids not knowing it’s real.”

Read Part 1: Death takes no holiday: Tracking gun violence over one long January weekend

Terrance Varise is getting his fill of reality now. He’s being held on charges of negligent homicide, cruelty to a minor and weapons possession along with a probation violation. He was not allowed to attend Travin’s funeral.

“He feels the pain and he’s going to live with this for the rest of his life,” his aunt said.

His mother said she feels like she’s lost two children.

“My father Jesus does things for a reason, but I don’t know what the reason is,” she said. “It’s a hurting feeling. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”

******

“There are two dead people.”

Those chilling words on a 911 call just after midnight on Jan. 21 were the last that anyone heard retired fire inspector William Liebrich utter. He hung up and then, police believe, shot his wife of 30 years, Colleen, before turning the 12-gauge shotgun on himself.

When cops arrived at the Warwick, R.I., home they found a note on the front door saying it was safe to enter and that the couple’s two sons, Bill, 24, and Jeff, 21, should not be allowed in. There were also letters for the boys, unsigned but typed by William, police say.

Before that, the sons said, it had been just like any other day. When Bill left for soccer practice, his dad told him, “Have fun. Be safe, bud.” Jeff watched TV with his dad before meeting friends.

“The thing that was so shocking about the whole thing is that life was moving along as normal. There wasn’t a single red flag, there wasn’t anything to show that anything like this could possibly happen. … It still feels like a nightmare,” said Jeff, an information technology student.

But life hadn’t been easy for Colleen. The once-active soccer and karate mom was mostly bedridden in recent months by a range of ailments: pancreatitis, osteoporosis, schizophrenia. She had suffered a seizure, memory loss, confusion and falls.

Warwick Police Capt. Robert Nelson said her condition was not terminal, but Bill recalled his mother hitting “an all-time low, physically and mentally,” on Christmas.

The brothers believe their parents decided together to end their lives. They said their father had never owned a gun and they assume he bought one to carry out a pact.

“It wasn’t just the fact that, you know, she wasn’t getting better,” Bill said. “It was the fact that she was progressively getting worse.”

The police are continuing their investigation into what they have tentatively ruled a murder-suicide and waiting for a trace on where the shotgun came from.

Bill and Jeff are treasuring the good memories of their parents -- their dad playing secret Santa and giving money to families in need, the couple's love of animals, the launch of their mother's salon business, which she eventually gave up because of her health – while coping with sadness and anger.

“I can see where my dad was coming from and I hate to say it like that because I don’t agree with what he did or how he did it,” said Jeff. “But I know what he was doing and the whole point was to put her out of pain, and he did that and she’s not in pain. So there’s a bittersweetness to it. “

Asked if they felt the need to forgive their father, Jeff said, “Obviously our primary focus is that we don’t have our parents anymore. … And so as far as forgiveness, there’s no one there to forgive.”

*****

Her “baby” was turning 7 and Lydia Bradford wanted it to be a day she would remember. She had ordered the cake and was getting the house ready. Soon, the cousins would start arriving for the party.

Her three daughters, including the birthday girl, were playing in the front of her Cocoa, Fla., house with another kid when a man with a ski mask burst in, police said. The terrified children fled as the intruder stalked to the rear of the small house and opened fire on Bradford, 24, and her mother Equaller, 58.

The young mom was killed and Equaller Bradford, shot in the chest and head, is still clinging to life. The motive is unknown and there have been no arrests, though family members suggest the women may have been victims of mistaken identity.

At Lydia Bradford’s funeral, relatives remembered her as a bubbly, carefree single mother devoted to her kids.

“Lydia didn’t sweat the small stuff,” said her aunt, Yvonne Smith. “You could hate her, but she loved you back. She was as pretty on the inside as she was on the outside.”

She supported her kids by working as a private-duty nurse. She had recently moved in with her mother and they were looking for a bigger place. Her weekends were full of cookouts and card games with family.

When her uncle Melvin was feeling low after chemotherapy, Bradford’s smile would cheer him up, Smith said. She chuckled as she remembered her niece’s sweet tooth, how she tucked into the homemade sweet-potato pie, lemon meringue pie, banana pudding and cake at Thanksgiving – then complained she had eaten too much.

Because she was a working mother, Bradford tried to make sure that holidays and birthdays were special for her girls. She was planning a Feb. 7 party at Chuck E. Cheese for all the cousins with January birthdays.

“Instead, we were all at her funeral that day,” Smith said, her voice cracking. “I know things like this happen every day, but it’s just sad that someone don’t care no more for life and took my baby away from her girls.”

She worries in particular for the 7-year-old.

“That was her birthday and now she’ll associate that for the rest of her life with the day her mama was killed,” she said.

******

The chain of events that led to Christopher Best’s death began when a big maple tree fell on the corner of his house in the Detroit suburb of Redford, Mich., in early January.

Best, 61, a computer whiz who had done sound and lights for countless rock-and-roll shows in Motor City, hired an old buddy from the music scene, carpenter Chris O’Brien, to repair the roof.

A few weeks later, on the evening of Jan. 21, Best drove to O’Brien’s Detroit home, with his dog Maxi in tow, to pay him $1,000. It was considered a relatively safe neighborhood, a historic district of Victorian homes, and Best had visited many times.

But this time, as Best got out of his car, he was “apparently ambushed” by robbers, police say. The sound of gunfire – O’Brien says police told him it was an AK-47 assault rifle-- shattered the dinnertime quiet on the tree-lined street.

“A dozen shots came into my house,” O’Brien recalled. “They were going by both sides of my head. If I would have taken one more step, my head would have been blown clear off.”

When the shooting stopped, he stepped outside and saw his friend of 30 years lying on his lawn. “It was cold that night,” O’Brien said. “I got down and put my arm under his head. He was gasping for air.”

Best, he said, died in the ambulance. No arrests have been made, but police say the motive was robbery.

An IT worker by day, Best’s passion was music. He played the guitar and keyboard and had a reputation as a reliable sound man in Detroit’s music joints. His obituary photo showed him mugging with Alice Cooper.

“He was a good guy, a pretty wholesome guy,” O’Brien. “He wasn’t into drugs, which is amazing for the rock and roll business. He didn’t even drink anymore.”

Best came from a large family; he was one of nine kids. And for years, the bachelor had been a foster parent, opening his home to young people in crisis and mentoring others, friend Sergio Sanchez said.

“He had a big heart,” Sanchez said. “That’s why it’s so hard to believe they shot him down because if they had given him the chance, I’m sure he would have just given them the money.”

******

It was just a fistfight.

Steven Rosalez, 16, got into a scuffle with an ex-con, Julius Short, 23, as he left a store with his friends in Pittsburg, Calif., his family says. It’s not known what prompted the fisticuffs, but when the fight  was over, the teen and the older man, who was on probation, went their separate ways.

That could have been the end of it. But according to police, Short wasn’t one to let it go. He got a gun, found Rosalez and shot him in the back and another 16-year-old in the leg, they said. The other boy survived, but Rosalez died.

“It’s devastated the whole family,” his mother, Wynette, said last Wednesday as Short was arraigned on charges of murder, attempted murder and weapons possession. He has not entered a plea.

She said her son was a happy boy growing up, always surrounded by friends and active in sports until he decided to give up football and baseball in the 10th grade. He was “kind of going through a little rough patch” and had run away from home once but had never been in trouble with the police, she said.

He spent most of his free time with his girlfriend of four years and playing Xbox. He had two brothers and a cousin he treated like a third. He was finishing high school in an independent study program and taking classes at a local college.

“He was loved,” she said, crying.

Short has a 2009 conviction for assault with a deadly weapon and he was on probation at the time of the slaying, which made Rosalez’s mother angry.

Complete coverage of "Flashpoint: Guns in America," an NBC News special report

“I grew up around guns and nobody did this when I was a kid and now here are these people who are felons and on probation and they get guns,” she said. “It’s not right.”

Also contributing to this story and map for NBC News: Daniel Arkin, Meredith Birkett, John Brecher, Bill Dedman, David Friedman, Kriss Chaumont, Polly DeFrank, Shezad Morani, Lisa Riordan Seville, Jonathan Sweeney and Lisa Wilkins.

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It was after midnight, early on a Saturday in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, and student Jason "Cowboy" Monson was at the police station to get back his Desert Eagle .45-caliber handgun.

In McDonough, Ga., about the same time, two teenage brothers were still awake. A friend was sleeping over, and their mother had let the boys handle her .38-caliber revolver, which was unloaded. She'd gone to bed.

In South Valley, N.M., it was quiet at the Griego household as 15-year-old Nehemiah waited for his father to come home from the night shift at a homeless shelter. The son was holding his father's AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

In the next few hours, the freshman in Idaho, one of the brothers in Georgia, and most of the Griego family would be dead, victims of three forms of gun violence — suicide, accident and murder — that are everyday occurrences in the United States.

Their deaths, and scores of others, occurred over a holiday weekend, the third weekend in January, when America celebrated the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a victim of gun violence. It also was the weekend the nation swore in a re-elected president whose inaugural address referred to guns, though he didn’t actually say the word: "Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm."

 

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By the end of the long weekend — after President Barack Obama had spoken and the red, white and blue confetti strewn along Pennsylvania Avenue had been cleaned up — at least 91 people across America had been killed by guns. That's more than three times the number of caskets needed in Connecticut after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. These 91 people died, not in a single burst of violence over a few minutes, but spread over a three-day weekend, like an autoworker stealing an entire convertible one part at a time to escape notice.

In the aftermath of the Dec. 14 Newtown shooting, during a renewed national debate about gun rights and gun control, NBC News picked the weekend of Jan. 19-21 to examine gun deaths across America. Today and on Monday and Tuesday, we'll tell you what we found and introduce you to some of the victims and their families. We also invite you to look at our online map and to draw your own impressions from the stories of violence.

We don't pretend to have found all the gun deaths over that weekend. There is no official census of gun deaths, and it takes the federal government many months to compile national crime and suicide statistics. We drew our list from the deaths that were reported in the press, and confirmed the details with authorities in all but a few cases. If you only want to know how many people are killed by guns on an average day in America, simply divide the annual figure, about 31,300, by 365 days, and there's your average: about 86 people a day.

Why did we find “only” 91 in three days? The main reason is that hardly any suicides get reported in the media. Suicides by gun are twice as common as gun homicides. Some homicides don't get any publicity either. Unless a killer chooses a public place, annihilates an entire family or shoots up a Wal-Mart, he might not even get on a website, in the newspaper or on TV, not on a holiday weekend competing with the festivities in the nation's capital and the Ravens-Patriots and Falcons-Seahawks games. The Griego family massacre in New Mexico was the only incident that long weekend to get significant national news attention. It also could be that holiday weekends with NFL championships are safer, with so many young men – who are statistically far more likely to shoot someone — inside instead, watching the games.

Guns by the numbers: how violence adds up

Our goal was not, however, merely to count the deaths, but to share the stories of the people who died, to see what lessons one might learn from those whose deaths usually go unnoticed, that don't prompt the president to order the White House flag to half-staff.

#####

It's an inescapable conclusion, even from our small sample, that there are many ways to get killed with a gun in America.

Based on interviews with police, prosecutors and family members in all but a few of the cases, we tallied 53 homicides where one person killed another. There were another three homicides where multiple people were killed. There were six murder-suicides, and six suicides. Five accidental shootings. Three shootings by police, and at least two by civilians in self-defense. That's 78 horrors with 91 dead. On a different randomly chosen weekend, the count might shake out differently.

You can get killed throwing your daughter a 17th birthday party, if your angry estranged husband shows up. Without a gun, you might have an angry confrontation and maybe some tears. With a handgun, the birthday girl in Grapevine, Texas, lost her mother and father in a murder-suicide, police said.

Or you can get killed buying a taco from a vendor on the street in Los Angeles, if you get into an argument with the wrong person, and that person has a gun.

Or catching a train: A bystander was killed at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in San Leandro, Calif., when a couple of gangs started trading shots.

You can get killed spending an afternoon with grandma. Just as the president was beginning his inaugural address and talking about making children safe, a gunman in Cocoa, Fla., burst into a home before a children's birthday party, shooting to death the mother of several of the children and seriously wounding their grandmother.

Or visiting a strip club. A U.S. Army soldier from Oklahoma's Fort Sill was killed outside a strip club during a dispute over a woman.

You can get killed for what may seem like like a pretty good reason, if, as the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre put it after the Newtown shooting, you're a “bad guy with a gun” who happens to run into a “good guy with a gun.” There were two shootings by citizens that apparently were justified over the long weekend, including one by a man in Bradenton, Fla., who was ready with his own handgun and a concealed weapons permit when three armed robbers wearing masks confronted him and his roommate in their carport, according to police. He killed one of them, and authorities determined it was in self-defense. There also were three shootings by police officers that have tentatively been ruled as justified, including one in which an ex-con was shot dead after he threatened to kill his hostage following an armed robbery.

But as we saw last week when a former Los Angeles police officer allegedly went on a murderous rampage against fellow law enforcement officers, the “good guys” aren’t immune to the demons that trigger gun violence. Over the inaugural weekend, a Las Vegas police lieutenant used a handgun to kill his wife, herself a former police officer, and their 5-year-old son, before killing himself, according to police, just as the president was taking his seat on the West Front terrace of the U.S. Capitol on Monday morning.

You can get killed when your fists are outgunned, like the 22-year-old man who his family said was standing up for his friends in a brawl, when someone else pulled a gun and shot him dead, according to police. They were in Torrance, Calif., attending a punk rock festival headlined by a band called "Aggression."

You can become an ironic headline, like the 20-year-old man in Lafayette, La., who was shot dead about 60 yards from the Martin Luther King Jr. recreation center, on Monday, the day when Dr. King's legacy of nonviolence was being celebrated. That shooting occurred about the time the Obamas left the White House for their inaugural ball.

Or you can be ignored as just another victim of a street crime or a drug deal, barely making the local newspapers if you're killed in a "confrontation at a mobile home park" or "shot and killed in an argument in a parking lot."

#####

One of the surprises in our snapshot of gun violence was how young many of the victims were.

Twenty of the 91 were too young to buy a beer at a baseball game. There's the 16-year-girl in Oregon named Kayla, who was shot to death by the highway, apparently by her 24-year-old boyfriend, who then shot and killed himself with the handgun, according to police. The 6-year-old girl in Cleveland —  her name was Navaeh, and her family called her "Nae Nae" — who somehow got her hands on what police said was the illegal handgun of her felon father, and shot herself in the face. The 18-year-old in Baton Rouge, Terrance, who was playing with a .357 Magnum; when it went off, the bullet missed him, and hit his 2-year-old brother, Travin, in the chest.

It's hard to miss how male the victims are: Out of 91 dead, 75 were men or boys. And the men were even more likely to be the ones pulling the trigger.

There's no way to count them all, but the press accounts of these deaths are sprinkled with deadly encounters fueled by drugs and alcohol. We didn't trace the race or ethnicity of victims or shooters for this project; though research indicates that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be involved in gun violence. But the cases over this weekend were not limited to "urban" violence, with the deaths happening in cities and small towns and suburbs across many class and ethnic groups.

Looking through the deaths from just that one weekend, one wonders how many of these deaths could have been prevented by the gun-control and gun-safety changes that are being discussed in Washington. There are no easy answers, but one can draw an overall conclusion: Because the types of gun deaths vary greatly, so the solutions would have to vary as well.

David Hemenway, a professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health, says it will require a national mindset shift to make big inroads into the number of gun deaths, similar to the change that occurred in how child abuse – a condition once considered so endemic that it couldn’t be addressed – was viewed after new laws against it were passed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

"If it was in your safety to have a gun in the home, people in public health would try to get you to own a gun," he said last month at a forum on gun violence sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Reuters news agency. "But what evidence we have is that it's against your self interest."

Improvement in mental health efforts, as proposed by the president, might make a difference, particularly in the 12 suicides and murder-suicides. But many of the cases will forever remain a mystery.

Warwick, R.I., Police Capt. Robert Nelson, who is investigating the murder-suicide of a longtime married couple on the MLK Day weekend, said the law enforcement system is set up to find and punish wrongdoers, not determine root causes: “We don’t have clear motive, and you know, you rarely do,” he told NBC News. “… As seen around the country, when someone kills somebody else then kills themselves as a result of that, you very rarely have any clear motive.”

In the Griego family massacre in New Mexico, as in the Newtown school shooting, there still is no clear understanding of what may have driven a young man to commit mass murder. Nehemiah Griego, 15, is facing murder charges in adult court. Police say the minister's son shot his mother and three younger siblings with a .22-caliber rifle as they lay in their beds early on that Saturday, then waited to shoot his father with the father's military-style AR-15 rifle.

What about the proposal to take "weapons of war" — or assault-type weapons —  off the streets, as Obama put it? Police are reluctant to give out details of the type of weapon used in a crime, because that's the sort of fact that they can use when interrogating witnesses and suspects. You'll see a lot of "unknown" for gun type on our map, and we don't have reliable information in most deaths about whether a gun was purchased or owned legally. There are several cases in which guns were not possessed legally.

The weekend of gun violence does leave an impression that few crimes are committed with the assault weapons whose legality is being debated in Washington. We saw one Detroit homicide where a witness said the gun was an AK-47, but police won't say one way or another. And Nehemiah Griego is said to have used a .22-caliber rifle, then a .223-caliber military-style AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

Most of the killing, however, is done with handguns that are not on the political radar, one or two victims at a time, not crimes that depend on high-capacity magazines with more than 10 bullets.

“Certainly I’m not naive enough to say that if we were to ban military-style assault rifles and if we were to ban high-capacity magazines, that we’re not going to have killings or murders," said George Gascón, the San Francisco district attorney, an advocate of banning those weapons and high-capacity magazines. He was discussing the death of Daniel Colon, 44, who was killed with an unknown weapon on the morning of the inauguration, as he was walking home with his cousin from a bar where he had celebrated the football victory by the 49ers. "All we’re saying is that we can reduce the mayhem, and we can have greater control to make sure that the people that own weapons do so in a lawful fashion.”

Accidental shootings of children may be the most preventable, when children get their hands on guns that adults have not secured.

In McDonough, Ga., where the mother was asleep, the sheriff's office says the mother had let the children handle her .38-caliber revolver earlier in the evening, when it was unloaded. Sometime in the night, one of the boys loaded the gun.

The mother was awakened around 2:30 a.m. by a gunshot.

The mother's 14-year-old son had pointed the gun at his 15-year-old brother's chest and squeezed the trigger, the sheriff’s office said. The sheriff and the district attorney haven't released the names of the boys, and say they haven't decided whether to charge the brother with a crime. The sheriff's office said it didn't consider charging the grieving mother, because her gun was legally owned.

Many gun owners say they need their guns to be at hand and ready in case of an intruder breaking in during the night. "You try to look at the science," Hemenway, the Harvard professor, said at the gun violence forum. "There's no evidence at all suggesting that having the gun that you can get within two seconds matters more than the gun you can get within 10 seconds. ... There is a huge amount of evidence that having an unsecured gun leads to all sorts of death in the family."

#####

Looking at the gun deaths across the land, on just one weekend, is a reminder how ingrained the gun culture is in America, a large part of the story the country tells about itself, especially in the way its young men find identity.

Consider Jason "Cowboy" Monson, the freshman from the University of Idaho who went down to the police station to get his gun back.

On Friday, just before our weekend clock began, Jason's roommate spoke with his resident adviser in the dorm, saying he was afraid because Jason was keeping his Desert Eagle handgun under his pillow.

Jason was raised on a small horse farm in Middleton, Idaho, hunting and fishing, playing football for a Christian school. He was raised around guns. Jason's father is a county sheriff's patrol sergeant, and his mother is a former Boise police officer. (His parents did not respond to a request from NBC News for an interview.) Jason won a national speech competition with 4H, and was studying communications. He was also in the Air Force ROTC and hoped to serve his country. He had a new girlfriend and a sense of humor, and posted a lot of funny stuff on his Facebook page.

His online summary of himself was unassuming: "im a total cowboy. I hunt cowboy mounted shoot and drive an old ford diesel. Ive broken several bones and most recently chainsawed my foot, that was a great two months, insert sarcasm. I own several guns and will be in the ROTC at the u of I this fall. any questions message me."

Cowboy Mounted Shooting looks like a lot of fun. (Watch a primer on YouTube.) The riders train skilled horses and compete on an obstacle course, wearing a Western long-sleeved shirt and a cowboy hat and shooting guns loaded with powder cartridges--blanks--at ballooons. Jason had already won a couple of belt buckles. One of his fellow competitors described him as "very nice, respectful, personable and outgoing." It's a great sport for someone who likes people, horses, and guns.

When the roommate reported the gun, Jason was not at the dorm. The school called the city police, and an officer came and took the gun away. The police chief in Moscow (for non-Idahoans: that's "MOS-ko"), David Duke, said there was no hint that Jason had made any threat against anyone, and Jason wasn't in a whole lot of trouble.

After all, this is Idaho, where guns are freely allowed with no registration, and one can openly carry a gun without any permit. Jason had violated no criminal law by bringing his handgun to his dorm room, the police chief said. It was against the school rules to have it there — students have to keep their guns in the central gun locker provided by the school. Jason could have faced student judicial charges, but it wasn't a criminal matter.

When Jason got back to the dorm, his roommate had been moved to another room, and Jason was told that his gun had been confiscated. He called the Moscow police about 10 p.m. to get his gun back, and the officer asked him to come down to the station. He came down about 1 a.m., and the officer said he could have his gun, but not until Tuesday, after the MLK holiday, so he'd have a chance to lock it up at school.

At 8:46 a.m. local time Sunday morning, just as the Obama family was participating in a day of service by fixing up an elementary school in the nation's capital, Moscow police got another call from the University of Idaho, from the same dorm.

One of Jason's suitemates had found him, shot in the head, next to notes he'd written to his family.

Idaho has one of the highest rates of suicides in the country, mostly from guns. It also was the only state in the union without its own certified hotline with counselors trained in suicide prevention; a hotline opened in November, but it's open  only Monday through Thursday, 9 to 5. Chief Duke says he gets a call about suicide on campus every couple of years or so.

It turned out that the Desert Eagle .45 was not Jason's only gun. Sometime in the night, he'd gone out to his pickup truck for his Smith and Wesson Model 66 .357-caliber revolver.

'Flashpoint: Guns in America,' an NBC News special report 

In his obituary, his parents took the opportunity to plead against gun control: "Let us drag the evil hiding in the darkness of the most dangerous places on earth: Gun free zones."

Jason's photo with his obituary shows Cowboy Monson with a big grin, wearing a black hat and astride a reddish-brown horse at a canter. Jason is looking directly at the camera, where he is pointing his blank pistol.

That image is the profile photo atop his Facebook page, too, now and perhaps forever, along with the cover image of two semi-automatic rifles criss-crossed over the U.S. Constitution.

Read Part 2: The faces behind the numbers: Six victims of long weekend's violence

 Also contributing to this story and map for NBC News: Daniel Arkin, Meredith Birkett, John Brecher, David Friedman, Kriss Chaumont, Tracy Connor, Polly DeFrank, Matthew DeLuca, Miranda Leitsinger, Shezad Morani, Lisa Riordan Seville, Jonathan Sweeney and Lisa Wilkins.

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The Justice Department announced Thursday that it has ended a lengthy investigation into the CIA's interrogation and treatment of prisoners without bringing any criminal charges. 

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced the investigation into the deaths of two suspected terrorists  who died in CIA custody -- one in Iraq and another in Afghanistan -- was ended without charges because "the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt." 

The two cases include the highly publicized case of Manadel al-Jamadi, who died in a shower stall at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq while in CIA custody.  Several U.S. soldiers, who were photographed with al-Jamadi's body, packed in ice inside a body bag, were later prosecuted and convicted in military courts for prisoner abuse. 

---

The investigation spanned more than four years. It began with an investigation into the CIA's destruction of videotapes of aggressive interrogations of terrorist suspects, but was later expanded to include the deaths of the two detainees. 

In all the Justice Department investigated the treatment of 101 detainees who been held in U.S. custody since 9/11. 

CIA Director David Petraeus issued a statement thanking everyone at the CIA who supported the Justice Departments investigations.  

In an apparent effort to put the incidents and investigations to rest, Petraeus added, "As intelligence officers our inclination of course is to look ahead to the challenges of the future rather than backwards at those of the past."

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KABUL, Afghanistan -- It was once President Barack Obama's "war of necessity." Now, it's America's forgotten war.

The Afghan conflict generates barely a whisper on the U.S. presidential campaign trail. It's not a hot topic at the office water cooler or in the halls of Congress — even though more than 80,000 American troops are still fighting here and dying at a rate of one a day.

Americans show more interest in the economy and taxes than the latest suicide bombings in a different, distant land. They're more tuned in to the political ad war playing out on television than the deadly fight still raging against the Taliban. Earlier this month, protesters at the Iowa State Fair chanted "Stop the war!" They were referring to one purportedly being waged against the middle class.

---

By the time voters go to the polls Nov. 6 to choose between Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, the war will be in its 12th year. For most Americans, that's long enough.

'Bumper sticker deep'
Public opinion remains largely negative toward the war, with 66 percent opposed to it and just 27 percent in favor in a May AP-GfK poll. More recently, a Quinnipiac University poll found that 60 percent of registered voters felt the U.S. should no longer be involved in Afghanistan. Just 31 percent said the U.S. is doing the right thing by fighting there now.

Not since the Korean War of the early 1950s — a much shorter but more intense fight — has an armed conflict involving America's sons and daughters captured so little public attention.

"We're bored with it," said Matthew Farwell, who served in the U.S. Army for five years including 16 months in eastern Afghanistan, where he sometimes received letters from grade school students addressed to the brave Marines in Iraq — the wrong war.

"We all laugh about how no one really cares," he said. "All the 'support the troops' stuff is bumper sticker deep."

Top US general's aircraft hit by rocket-fire in Afghanistan

Farwell, 29, who is now studying at the University of Virginia, said the war is rarely a topic of conversation on campus — and he isn't surprised that it's not discussed much on the campaign trail.

"No one understands how to extricate ourselves from the mess we have made there," he said. "So from a purely political point of view, I wouldn't be talking about it if I were Barack Obama or Mitt Romney either."

Ignoring the Afghan war, though, doesn't make it go away.

According to the defense department's latest tally (updated on August 21, 2012 at 10 a.m. ET), 1,972 Americans have died in Afghanistan since President George W. Bush launched attacks there in October 2001 to rout al-Qaida.

The terrorist group used Afghanistan to train recruits and plot the Sept. 11 attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans.

If casualties in other countries are included, the number of Americans killed since the start of the war is 2,091.

According to an analysis of U.S. forces killed in the war by The New York Times, three out of four who died were white, nine out of 10 were enlisted service members and the average age of those who died was 26. Half of the deaths were in Afghanistan's Kandahar or Helmand provinces — in the country's Taliban-dominated south, the Times reported.

The war drags on even though al-Qaida has been largely driven out of Afghanistan and its charismatic leader Osama bin Laden is dead — slain in a U.S. raid on his Pakistani hideout last year.

Strangely, Afghanistan never seemed to grab the same degree of public and media attention as the war in Iraq, which Obama opposed as a "war of choice."

Unlike Iraq, victory in Afghanistan seemed to come quickly. Kabul fell within weeks of the U.S. invasion in October 2001. The hardline Taliban regime was toppled with few U.S. casualties.

But the Bush administration's shift toward war with Iraq left the Western powers without enough resources on the ground, so by 2006 the Taliban had regrouped into a serious military threat.

Candidate Obama promised to refocus America's resources on Afghanistan. But by the time President Obama sent 33,000 more troops to Afghanistan in December 2009 in a policy known as the "surge", years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan had drained Western resources and sapped resolve to build a viable Afghan state.

Army casualties during the surge were heaviest at Fort Campbell in Kentucky (home to the 101st Airborne Division) and Fort Drum in New York (home to the 10th Mountain division), according to the Times' analysis of deaths. Units at both bases were frequently deployed to Afghanistan during the surge, the Times reported.

Panetta intervenes after 10th US service member killed in 2 weeks in Afghanistan

Over time, Obama's administration has grown weary of trying to tackle Afghanistan's seemingly intractable problems of poverty and corruption. The American people have grown weary too.

While most Americans are sympathetic to the plight of the Afghan people, they have become deeply skeptical of President Hamid Karzai's willingness to tackle corruption and political patronage and the coalition's chances of "budging a medieval society" into the modern world, says Ann Marlowe, a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute, a policy research organization in Washington.

"With millions of veterans home and talking with their families and friends ... some knowledge of just how hard this is has percolated down," said Marlowe, who has traveled to Afghanistan many times.

It has also been hard to show progress on the battlefield.

World War II had its Normandy, Vietnam its Tet Offensive and Iraq its Battle of Fallujah. Afghanistan is a grinding slough in villages and remote valleys where success is measured in increments.

The Afghan war transformed into a series of small, often vicious and intense fights scattered across a country almost as large as Texas.

What's leading Afghan troops to turn on coalition forces?

In July, 40 U.S. service members died in Afghanistan in the deadliest month for American troops so far this year. At least 31 have been killed this month — seven when a helicopter crashed during a firefight with insurgents in what was one of the deadliest air disasters of the war. Ten others were gunned down in attacks from members of the Afghan security forces — either disgruntled turncoats or Taliban infiltrators.

Many argue that bin Laden's death justifies a quick U.S. exit from Afghanistan. Others say it's important to stay longer to shore up the Afghan security forces and help build the government so that it can stand on its own. An unstable Afghanistan could again offer sanctuary to militants like al-Qaida who want to harm American and its allies, they say.

"Those of us who have been at this for a long time continue to think that it's important, and that we have a chance now of a path forward with a long-term perspective that will produce the results," said James Cunningham, the new U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

US forces in Afghanistan ordered to keep weapons loaded at all times

The U.S.-led coalition's combat mission will wind down in the next few years, leading up to the end of 2014 when most international troops will have left or moved into support roles.

Military analysts say the U.S. envisions a post-2014 force of perhaps 20,000 to hunt terrorists, train the Afghan forces and keep an eye on neighboring Iran and other regional powerhouse nations.

Americans aren't likely to know the number until later this year. But will anyone other than families of service personnel take note?

"I have heard others say that the danger that their spouses or children are serving in is just simply not being cared about," said Fred Wellman, a 22-year Army veteran who did three tours in Iraq. "I think a lot of veterans feel it is just forgotten."

Political satirist Garry Trudeau captured the apathy about the war in a comic strip this year showing a U.S. servicewoman stationed in Afghanistan calling her brother back home.

After he complains that his children have the flu and how he's struggling to keep up with their hectic hockey schedule, he asks her where she's calling from. She tells him she's in Afghanistan.

"Oh, right, right ..." her brother replies. "Wait, we're still there?"

The Associated Press and NBC News staff contributed to this report.

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More than 10,000 people have been injured – 321 of them fatally – in California over the past ten years as a result of high-speed police chases, according to data obtained by NBCLosAngeles.com.

The deaths and injuries have continued apace in the state even after a law was enacted to try to reduce the number of chases and make them less dangerous. In fact, the data show that individual chases have become more deadly since the law went into effect in 2006.

---

Last year alone, pursuits culminated in crashes that caused 927 injuries and 33 deaths, among them one police officer and eight people who were either passengers or bystanders, according to the data, which was provided to NBC4 by the California Highway Patrol.

In the most recent case, a grisly collision in Los Angeles on Saturday that killed two women and injured three other people at a taco truck in Boyle heights, driver Elba Jimenez, of Upland, will be charged with two counts of murder, felony drunk driving and failing to yield to law enforcement, said a top official at the California Highway Patrol.

CHP officers said they initiated that chase after Jimenez, who allegedly was weaving in lanes, failed to pull over after they flashed their lights and blared their sirens on I-10 near downtown. They pursued her to Northbound I-5, where Jimenez allegedly exited at Cesar Chavez and plowed into a parking lot filled with people.

“It’s an absolutely tragic situation,” Asst. Commissioner Ramona Prieto told NBC4 on Monday. “My heart goes out to the families, the people who witnessed it, and the people who were injured. It’s a horrible, horrible situation.”

Read more stories from NBCLosAngeles.com

The CHP plans to investigate the incident, as it does all chases in which someone is injured or killed, she said.

“We have a standardized pursuit critique that carefully looks at every aspect of the pursuit,” Prieto said.

As concerns over high-speed chases have mounted over the years, the CHP has instituted a number of policies aimed at reducing their frequency and danger, Prieto said.

For example, she said, the police agency uses so-called spike strips – pieces of sharp, pointed equipment aimed at blowing out vehicle tires – which are dropped on the road in front of a fleeing car in an effort to disable it.

Graph showing fatalities resulting from police pursuits

The CHP also employs what it calls an "immobilization technique," also known as a "PIT maneuver," in which a squad car bumps a car whose driver is trying to flee in an effort to turn the car around and prevent him or her from driving away, Prieto said.

Officers undergo quarterly training about safety and appropriateness in pursuits, including spending time in a traffic simulator that mimics the experience of chasing a fleeing car.

Other police agencies have implemented stricter policies. The Los Angeles Police Department, for example, no longer engages in high-speed chases of drivers who are only suspected of traffic infractions or misdemeanors.

"They're not pursuing for infractions and things like that, because it became very dangerous," said LAPD Capt. Anne E. Young, who heads the Central Traffic Division.

But many public safety advocates – and families of those killed or injured as a result of high-speed pursuits – say the state and law enforcement agencies aren't doing enough.

“Every chase increases the risk to public and to the police officers,” said Candy Priano of Chico, whose daughter, Kristy, was killed after a police chase in 2002.

Graph showing police pursuits and collisions in California

Priano, who founded the watchdog group Voices Insisting on Pursuit Safety, said pursuit-related crashes kill an average of 30 bystanders every six weeks in the U.S.

The group is developing a legislative committee at the federal and state levels to call for changes in police training, is pushing for a law that would make reporting pursuit information by police agencies mandatory nationally and for stiffening penalties for those who flee police.

The CHP records, collected from the all police agencies in the state, show that the deadliest of the past ten years was 2009, when 42 people were killed in chase-related collisions in the state.

In fact, even though the total number of pursuits has gone down in the state since a law aimed at curbing them went into effect in 2006, the chases appear to actually have become more dangerous.

There was one death for every 228 chases in 2003, a year when California led the nation in police pursuits. The death toll in 2009 amounted to one for every 132 chases.

The casualties have sparked continuous soul-searching among law enforcement agencies, said Prieto of the California Highway Patrol.

“We talk about it frequently,” Prieto said. “Pursuits are a really important question for all law enforcement, because of the liability and the damage that can be caused. … What we do can really hurt or kill someone.”

But, she said, the agency ultimately believes that police agencies need to be able to pursue drivers who may have committed crimes or are driving erratically.

“Sometimes a bigger crime has been committed,” she said.

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When Nicholas Adrian Revetta of suburban Pittsburgh died in an explosion at a U.S. Steel plant on Sept. 3, 2009, his death did not make national headlines. No hearings were held into the accident that killed him. No one was fired or sent to jail.           

The 32-year-old contract laborer, who left behind a wife and two young children, was one of the 4,551 people killed on the job in America in 2009 -- a number that eclipsed the total number of U.S. fatalities in the nine-year Iraq war. Combined with the estimated 50,000 people who die annually of work-related diseases, it's as if a fully loaded Boeing 737-700 crashed every day.

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The Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 entitles American workers to "safe and healthful" conditions in their workplaces. But an examination of Revetta's death by the Center for Public Integrity illustrates how safety can yield to speed, how even fatal accidents can have few consequences for employers -- who are typically fined just $7,900 per fatality -- and how federal investigations can be cut short by what some call a de facto quota system.  

Click here to read the rest of the story.

 

For the second straight year, the number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty rose sharply in 2011, according to statistics released Wednesday.

Preliminary data compiled by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund showed that 173 federal, state and local officers have been killed on the job so far this year, 13 percent more than the 153 who died in 2010 — and 42 percent more than the 122 officers who were killed in 2009.

The memorial fund, a nonprofit group that runs the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial in Washington, attributed the steep rise to "drastic budget cuts" that "have put our officers at grave risk."

---

Police "are facing a more cold-blooded criminal element and fighting a war on terror," but "we are cutting vital resources necessary to ensure their safety," said Craig Floyd, the fund's chairman.

The leading cause of death was gunfire, which has killed 68 officers this year, just one short of the decade-long high of 69 in 2007.

One of them was Scotty Richardson, 33, a master officer with the Aiken, S.C., police, who was buried Tuesday in a flag-draped coffin. Richardson died after he was shot in the head Dec. 20 during a nighttime traffic stop. His partner was also shot and survived, NBC station WAGT of Augusta, Ga., reported.

WAGT-TV: Life of Officer Scotty Richardson celebrated

Police charged Stephon Carter, 19, with murder and attempted murder.

Aiken Public Safety Director Pete Frommer said Richardson held the title "master officer" because of his diligence and sheer hard work.

"He had an additional 1,460 hours of advanced training," Frommer said. "Everybody can't do that."

Aiken Mayor Fred Cavanaugh said the ceremony was first time in a long while that a tragedy of such magnitude had hit his community.

"We're going to move forward, and it's sad that this happened, and we never want it to happen again," Cavanaugh said.

This is the first time in 13 years that shootings outpaced traffic incidents as the leading cause of officers' deaths, the police fund reported, which Linda Moon Gregory, president of Concerns of Police Survivors, a nonprofit interest group, blamed on inadequate training and equipment.

"At a time when criminals have the latest technology and weapons, we must ensure that our peace officers are adequately equipped and protected," Gregory said in a statement.

The most officers were killed in large states, such as Texas and California, and states in the South, seven of which were in the top 13:

• Florida 14
• Texas 13
• New York 11
• California 10
• Georgia 10
• Tennessee 7
• North Carolina 7
• Missouri 6
• Ohio 6
• Arizona 5
• Louisiana 5
• New Jersey 5
• Michigan 5
• Virginia 5

Read the full report

NBC station WAGT of Augusta, Ga., contributed to this report.

Follow M. Alex Johnson on Twitter and Facebook

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A young couple with wanderlust and a love of trains were found dead this week buried under thousands of pounds of coal in Florida.

Workers at the McIntosh Power Plant in Lakeland, Fla., found the bodies of Christopher Artes and Medeana Hendershot.

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"Artes, 25, and Hendershot, 22, may have been aboard a coal train that arrived late Saturday night in Lakeland, police said," The Lakeland Ledger reports in a story recounting the couple's itinerant-by-choice lives. "The couple appeared to have died as the coal, about 12,500 tons total, was dumped from the train, plunging the equivalent of multiple stories."

Artes, who grew up in Baltimore, hopscotched the country on trains, his family said. He met Hendershot in South Carolina.

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