Ahenewa El-Amin at Douglass Park in Lexington, Ky. Chad Batka for The New York Times

Almost once a day last year, on average, a shooting in the United States left at least four people dead or wounded. In May, we wrote about this drumbeat of gunplay. Today we turn to some of the 100-plus innocent bystanders among the 1,792 casualties.

June 21, 2015. Lexington, Ky. 1 Killed, 4 Injured

Chad Batka for The New York Times

Douglass Park is a short walk from Ahenewa El-Amin’s house in Lexington, Ky. But she will not take her 7-year-old daughter there.

On June 21, Ms. El-Amin’s brother, Kwame El-Amin, was fatally shot while watching an evening basketball tournament at the park.

Mr. El-Amin, a food-truck owner and father of three, was struck in the neck after several gunmen suddenly began firing from opposite sides of the court. Four others were wounded.

Kwame El-Amin with his daughter.

The police say a dispute between rival groups of young men provoked the violence. The case remains unsolved, like almost half of the 358 shootings examined by The New York Times that left four or more people dead or wounded last year.

Ms. El-Amin says she is alarmed by witnesses’ refusal to cooperate. Her sister tries to avoid shops popular with young men for fear that she will unknowingly stand next to her brother’s killer.

“How in the world could things get better if nobody is held accountable?” Ms. El-Amin asked.

She also cannot comprehend why the gunmen fired into a crowd of innocent people. Even children know better, she said: “You’re angry at someone else on the playground and you’re 5, you really don’t go and hit everyone on the playground.”

Her brother’s sons, 22 and 17, now seem unmoored, as if a hurricane had blown away the frameworks of their lives. The younger boy has been skipping school, shocking a family dominated by teachers.

“I almost feel like in many ways the bullet that took Kwame’s life also took my nephew’s chances of ever going to college,” Ms. El-Amin said.

June 11, 2015. Bridgeport, Conn. 1 Killed, 8 Injured

An anti-violence rally on Trumbull Avenue. Brian A. Pounds, Connecticut Post/Hearst Connecticut Media

Trumbull Gardens, a public housing project in Bridgeport, Conn., is a treeless warren of look-alike townhouses anchored by high-rises. One evening last June, a score of people sat on car hoods in one of the complex’s half dozen parking lots, chatting and listening to music. One peddled sunglasses; Savonnie McNeil, 37, a father of five who worked at a countertop company, was about to try on a pair.

Several men burst around a corner, carrying semiautomatic handguns. Gang members seeking revenge, they had slipped through a two-foot hole in the back fence of the 400-unit complex, said Detective Christopher Lamaine of the Bridgeport Police Department.

But in the dark, they got turned around.

“They shot at the wrong parking lot,” he said. “Their targets were in the next parking lot over.”

Trumbull Gardens after the shooting. Brad Horrigan/Hartford Courant

One of at least 19 bullets struck Mr. McNeil in the head, killing him. Another sailed through a wall, wounding a 59-year-old grandmother taking a shower in her second-story apartment. Seven others were hurt, including a man who now has a rod in his leg.

Only one, a man shot four times as he tried to crawl under a car, might have been an intended target, the police said.

One suspect later acknowledged that he knew he was in the wrong place, but opened fire anyway, because “he was already there,” the detective said.

The next weekend, about 300 protesters marched through the housing project. “The ground is coated with the blood of our children,” one yelled.

February 6, 2015. Tulsa, Okla. 1 Killed, 4 Injured

It was closing time, but Lawrence Harris was still shaving his last client at the Gifted Hands Barber and Beauty Shop in Tulsa, Okla. He was on the phone with his wife, explaining why he was still at work at 9 p.m., when he heard an earsplitting boom.

“The next thing I know, I was laying on the ground,” he said. “I could actually see shell casings dancing on the ground. The entire barbershop was filled with smoke. I could smell gunpowder.

“I can still smell it to this day.”

Lawrence Harris Jaime Harris

A gang member had burst into the shop with an AK-47, aiming for a rival in a nearby chair.

Instead, he shot and killed Keith Liggins, 41, who was cutting the man’s hair. Another bullet shattered Mr. Harris’s knee. Two other men were injured; the gunman’s alleged accomplice was wounded when the target fired back, the police said.

Mr. Harris said a hospital nurse, apparently assuming he was a criminal, treated him roughly. “I’ve never heard him scream like that,” his wife, Jaime, said.

When she took time off from work to care for him, she lost her job and their health insurance. For the first time in their married life, the couple had to resort to food stamps to feed five children, ages 4 to 17.

The night of the shooting. KOTV

After five surgeries and more than $50,000 in medical bills, Mr. Harris, 38, still needs a knee replacement. He said he had accepted that he will never teach his youngest son to play basketball, never again cut hair, never hold any job that demands much standing.

“I was thinking I can get past this, and I’ll be back to the same knee,” he said. “But every time I went to the doctor it became more of a realization that I would never, ever be the same person.”

While the gang member who started the shooting has been convicted of murder, his alleged accomplice still faces a murder charge.

Mr. Harris sleeps in his living room, so he can see the front door.

August 1, 2015. Orlando, Fla. 4 Injured

Children playing at the Pacifico Place apartments in Orlando in May near where Victor Hernandez was shot last August. Jacob Langston for The New York Times

Gloria Perez had just finished the laundry and arrived at her apartment on a Saturday evening when she heard screaming. Her 10-year-old grandson, Victor Hernandez, raced out the apartment door, his hand clasped over his face.

Victor lived with Ms. Perez in a complex of worn townhouse apartments about 10 minutes from downtown Orlando. Playing a video game in his bedroom moments earlier, he had heard a ruckus outside.

In the parking lot, several friends were helping a man named Junior move into a new apartment. Junior’s girlfriend, Bianca Wade, then 25, who is also Victor’s cousin, was nine months pregnant.

A group of men walking by made a suggestive remark about Ms. Wade, and an argument erupted. Junior’s friend Diego Hernandez, no relation to Victor, later told the police that he had pulled off his shirt and offered to fight the man who had delivered the insult.

But there was no fight. Instead, one or more men pulled out nine-millimeter handguns, the police said. Fifteen shots were fired in a matter of seconds.

Victor peered out to see what was happening. At that instant, a bullet flew 30 feet through his apartment window. Family members said the bullet struck him in the left eye, although the police suggested that he might have been hit by flying glass.

“Shots went through my window. I don’t know who shot,” a sobbing woman in the boy’s apartment told a 911 dispatcher moments afterward.

Diego Hernandez was wounded in the forearm. Two friends were shot in the legs. Of the three, only Mr. Hernandez cooperated with investigators, the police said. No arrest has been made.

Surgeons removed Victor’s eye to prevent the spread of an infection that could have rendered him blind. Fearing another attack, the Perez family moved out of the apartment complex within days. They left no forwarding address.

Reached by phone, Victor’s grandmother said only this: “I do not want to remember that day.”

May 10, 2015. Newark 1 Killed, 3 Injured

Sherkimea Zigler Chad Batka for The New York Times

Of her four teenage sons, Sherkimea Zigler said, the youngest, a 15-year-old nicknamed Monk, was the most sensitive. “If I was going through something, he was the one who could come to me and say, ‘Mommy, don’t worry about it. Things are going to get better,’ ” she said.

Al-Shakeem Woodson, the friendly and athletic youth known as Monk, played football and basketball, and as the eighth grade neared an end in May 2015, he had made the honor roll. He did not live with his mother — she had separated from his father, a grocery store supervisor in Newark. All four of their sons lived with him.

But that seemed set to change. Ms. Zigler, 37, said she had expected a judge to allow Monk to move to her home in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., partly, she had argued, because “kids are dying right and left” in Newark.

On Sunday, May 10, Monk called to wish her a happy Mother’s Day. That evening, he went to an outdoor motorcycle exhibition. Among hundreds of onlookers were two rival bands of teenagers, with at least four handguns.

Al-Shakeem Woodson

Caught in the crossfire between them, Monk died from a bullet to the head. Two other bystanders were wounded. The Newark police charged two teenagers, 16 and 19, with murder. Three other teenagers, including one who was wounded in the gunfight, were charged with weapons offenses.

The shooting arose from “a high-school type of dispute that escalated beyond anything that really should be imaginable,” said Carolyn A. Murray, Essex County’s acting prosecutor.

Ms. Zigler said, “My baby was just about to graduate to ninth grade. He didn’t even get to march” in the commencement ceremony.

“I’m torn into pieces,” she said. “I was so scared for my kids, and now it’s too late. I’m left without one.”

August 15, 2015. Orangeburg, S.C. 1 Killed, 3 Injured

Antwan Jones at the Pit Stop Pub. Chad Batka for The New York Times

Tall, shy and soft-spoken, Antwan Jones, 28, says he is careful to avoid trouble. He drinks juice or Sprite instead of alcohol, attends church and answers questions with “Yes, Ma’am.” His most serious encounter with the law has been a speeding ticket.

“I am a good person. I have got a good family,” Mr. Jones said. “I don’t do dumb stuff.”

But others do.

On August 15, Mr. Jones was bidding his brother and a friend good night outside the Pit Stop Pub, a cement block tavern on a semirural stretch of road in Orangeburg, S.C., when a bar patron drove past.

According to the police and witnesses, the man, who had lost a fist fight at the bar earlier that evening, pointed a handgun out an open car window and sprayed the parking lot with bullets.

Mr. Jones, a father of two, was struck in both legs, his arm and his buttocks. A 22-year-old man standing behind him — another bystander, law-enforcement officials later said — was killed. Two others were injured.

“It all happened so fast,” Mr. Jones said. “I didn’t even know I had been shot. It’s crazy, but once shots start coming your way, you blank out.”

Mr. Jones said he now suffered from continual numbness and pain in his left foot, possibly because of nerve damage from a bullet that tore through that leg. Unemployed, he owes $15,000 in medical bills.

“Everything has changed,” he said.

A 30-year-old man from North Carolina has been charged with murder and attempted murder. Mr. Jones does not plan to see his attacker in court. Despite his best efforts, he said, anger sometimes overwhelms him.

“He messed up people’s lives who did nothing to him,” Mr. Jones said.