NBC Nightly News on Sunday devoted the first 14 minutes of the broadcast to a single story: The shootings that unfolded in four major cities during the previous night.
While the wave of horrific mass shootings garner nationwide attention, “far more Americans are killed in smaller incidents” across the country each night, Kate Snow, who anchors on Sundays, said at the top of the broadcast. Snow and three other correspondents worked overnight shifts in different cities to capture “how gun violence is destroying communities and plaguing our country.”
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In an interview with Deadline, Snow said that Nightly News weekend executive producer Matt Frucci “had been thinking about the horrific gun violence we report on, especially when there is a mass shooting, obviously the news media responds in a huge way when that happens. But when you work the weekend shift, you notice that every Sunday we would be talking about the violence on Saturday and seeing if we could fit a little bit in our show. That just felt wrong to Matt. He felt like we should spend a night, really focusing on the daily, unfortunately horrifically routine violence that is happening in places all over the country.”
Frucci said, “We cover those individual shootings when they happen, whether it is a bad weekend in Chicago or a bad weekend in Philadelphia. What’s been a challenge to cover and get across is kind of the totality of that, just how often it occurs. It literally happens every night in America, more so on weekend nights, but every night in America. In cities and towns across the country there is gun violence, and it is so hard to capture largeness of those numbers. You can look at the statistics, and it’ll tell you yes, there are 40,000 gun deaths on average every year. But’s hard to kind of get across who these people are, how those gun deaths are happening, how it is affecting communities, how it is tying up our police forces and our health care system.”
Snow was in Chicago following Pastor Donovan Price, who ministers to gun violence victims and their families. Price told Snow that he’s responded to 1,000 homicides in his career, and Saturday was no different, as he counseled the family members of another victim.
Gabe Gutierrez was at the University of Maryland Medical Center’s Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, where he reported on two gunshot victims, one of whom did not survive. That is apparent when the call for “time of death” is made by a member of the medical team trying to save a life.