Killed by a Gun: Faces of the Child Victims

Ja'Quail Mansaw was just 7 months old when a spray of bullets came crashing into his family's Kansas City, Kansas, home. Seven-month-old Nathaniel Hitt was sitting in his walker in Rome, New York, when his mother's boyfriend accidentally shot him while cleaning a shotgun. 

The two kids are among hundreds of children under 12 who are shot and killed each year, either by accident or on purpose, NBC News reported. The massacre of 20 first-graders at a Newtown, Connecticut, school three years ago outraged the nation and spurred calls for new legislation, but it did nothing to slow the firearm deaths of young Americans.

NBC News looked at cases in which children under 12 have been killed by guns since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary and counted 554 deaths. The victims are black and white, Asian and Latino. They live in cities, suburbs and rural areas. They die in hunting mishaps, get caught in street crossfire, are targeted by murderers and intentionally or unintentionally shoot themselves. The only thing that ties them together is the cause of death: gunshot wound. Click through for some of their stories.

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