LARGO, Maryland (AP) — Florena Carter's shattered life didn't make national news.
Her son was killed on his 28th birthday in 2009. Carter's brother pulled the trigger. Her father shot himself soon afterward.
The horrifying family tragedy became one more private story in America's plague of grinding daily gun violence. That year, 9,146 other people nationwide lost their lives in shootings.
The vast majority died in the type of daily gun violence that does not grab national headlines in the same way as the December massacre of 20 young children and six teachers at an elementary school in Connecticut, or the mass shooting last July in a Colorado movie theater that killed 12 people and wounded 70.
