Nearly 1,000 children under the age of 12 have died from guns in the U.S. in the five years since the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary School. That means one child has been fatally shot in this country every 44 hours — the equivalent of every other day.

NBC News used a variety of sources, including The Gun Violence Archive, Slate.com, selected state child fatality reports, and additional news gathering to compile this data. NBC News then did extensive fact-checking and analysis of the details of each shooting to identify trends and patterns. Because our research was reliant on news accounts and publicly available information, we do not have complete information on every fatality. In particular, if a death was suspected to be a suicide or when a child was shot by a sibling or another child, police sometimes withheld specifics. For this reason, the numbers below do not reflect the details of all shootings.