Theirs are the faces behind the numbers. A hard-working college student shot in her prized car. A fun-loving 2-year-old accidentally shot by his brother. An aging rocker killed for a thousand bucks.

As part of a special NBC News report, “Flashpoint: Guns in America,” NBCNews.com catalogued 91 shooting deaths across the country between Jan. 19 and 21, the weekend the nation marked the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. and ushered a president into his second term. While not a statistically valid sample, the snapshot of gun violence in America is intended to illuminate both the magnitude of the problem and the personal toll such violence inflicts at a time of national debate about gun rights and gun control in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., school shooting.

The victims we found died during robberies, after arguments, in moments of despair. They were killed by loved ones, by strangers, by their own hand. Each story, in its own way, is heartbreaking. As the country awaits President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night, we share a handful of them here:

Rebecca Foley worked as a babysitter, office clerk and cater-waiter to put herself through college, and she scraped and saved to make her first big purchase: a 2006 cherry-red Volkswagen Beetle. The 21-year-old business student adored tooling around Savannah, Ga., with the windows down.

Courtesy Sarah Shoup

Rebecca Foley, left, leans against her VW Beetle with friend Sarah Shoup in this undated photo.

On the evening of Jan. 21, she was driving home with her boyfriend of a year following behind in his own car after getting his nails painted because he lost a bet with her, police said. He got caught up in traffic and so she was alone as she piloted the car into her apartment complex’s parking lot, past the live oak trees and hanging moss, toward her tidy garden-level unit.

What happened next is a mystery, but the boyfriend told police that when he finally caught up, he found the little red car stopped at a bizarre angle and Foley slumped over the steering wheel. She had been shot, apparently while the car was still moving, and would be dead within minutes. The rear, driver-side window was shattered by a single bullet that left a hole the size of a 50-cent piece. No arrests have been made, despite a $6,000 reward, and the motive is unknown.

To family and friends, Foley’s violent end still seems unreal.

“She never was around anybody who would put her in a bad situation. She never had any enemies,” said Alixandra Scalia, 20, a former roommate.

Interactive map: A long weekend of gun deaths. Click to enlarge.

Friends and family members use almost identical language to describe Foley, calling her a beautiful, hard-working young woman who was determined to put old family troubles behind her and realize her goal of a degree, grad school and a good job in the risk-management industry.

Born in Charlotte, N.C., and raised in rural Virginia and Georgia by her divorced mom, Foley played the violin at 4 but didn’t read until second grade, after she was diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder. She had a rocky relationship with her mother, Jennifer, and moved out when she was 17.

“She said, ‘I can’t live under your roof and I won’t.’ But she graduated high school, which doesn’t always happen in these cases, and she went on to college,” her mother told NBC News.

She bounced between several colleges and overcame academic setbacks before enrolling full-time at Savannah State University, where she hit her stride. Her mother said she “worked her butt off” to stay on track, and one of her professors wrote that she was a “joy to work with.”

She would rise at 4:30 some mornings to fit in work in a local insurance office before school. She kept her credit score on a Post-it note and cooked dinner with a friend every night to save money.

At Christmas, she splurged a little on her “very first cruise” to the Bahamas, said one of her bosses, insurance agent Mitchell Bush. She dreamed of buying a fixer-upper on Tybee Island, an island town near Savannah.

“We had just talked about that on Sunday -- and Monday she was dead,” said her grandmother, Lois Fowler.

The night of the shooting, Foley’s two roommates were in the apartment when they heard her boyfriend banging on the door.

“He was just saying, ‘Rebecca’s been shot and just kept repeating that,’” said Abbey Bernal, 22. “Medics tried to resuscitate her, and it was too late. I just saw them pull the sheet over her head.”

Friends and family said they can’t believe they won’t see Foley’s flashing blue eyes and big smile again. They remember how she loved cream of potato soup, wore SpongeBob slippers and doted on her Shih-Tzu named Zoe.

Jim Seida / NBC News

Jennifer Foley holds a portrait of her daughter, Rebecca, inside her Calhoun, Ga. home.

Foley’s mother said she and her daughter had grown closer in recent months and that Rebecca had called the day she was killed to ask what dishes would go well with a pork roast.

And there was another conversation she remembered.

“She called me not six months ago and said she had a dream that she was going to die young,” her mother said. “I told her, ‘I don’t think that’s true. I hope that’s not true.’”

******

Family members say they’ll remember 2-year-old Travin Varise for how his chubby face would break into the sweetest smile, how excited he got every time “Finding Nemo” came on, how he went after a drumstick with gusto.

And how he loved his big brother, Terrance.

Family photo

Travin Varise, 2, was fatally shot at his Baton Rouge, La., home on Jan. 21.

“Terrance growed his little brother up,” his aunt, Juanita, said. “Before my sister knew who the baby’s father was, he raised him up like it was his son.”

That’s why, the family says, it’s tragic that Terrance, 18, is now locked up, charged with accidentally killing the toddler while playing with a friend’s .357 Magnum at their Baton Rouge, La., home. He has not yet entered a plea.

“It’s so hard,” said the boys’ mother, Yarnell.

She was crying, but her voice took on an edge as she complained she had not been able to visit her eldest child because the jail is too far away. “I want him to know it’s going to be all right. I know he didn’t do it on purpose,” she said.

Terrance was on probation after pleading guilty to burglary in May, but his mother said he was a “good dude” who had matured since then. His aunt said he didn’t carry a weapon – “We don’t allow guns in the house” – but had been hanging out with “the wrong crowd.”

Terrance’s Facebook page, however, suggests an interest in guns. There’s a photo of a small arsenal laid out on a plaid bedspread, another where he is holding a silver revolver at his side, a third where he appears to be dangling a shotgun from one finger.

East Baton Rouge District Attorney Hillar Moore says he sees pictures like that all the time after a young person is arrested for a violent crime.

“Do you know where your guns are? Because young kids play with guns and bad things happen sometimes,” he said. “I think it’s video games and stuff – no one really dies and everyone wakes up the next morning. There’s a whole culture of kids not knowing it’s real.”

Read Part 1: Death takes no holiday: Tracking gun violence over one long January weekend

Terrance Varise is getting his fill of reality now. He’s being held on charges of negligent homicide, cruelty to a minor and weapons possession along with a probation violation. He was not allowed to attend Travin’s funeral.

“He feels the pain and he’s going to live with this for the rest of his life,” his aunt said.

His mother said she feels like she’s lost two children.

“My father Jesus does things for a reason, but I don’t know what the reason is,” she said. “It’s a hurting feeling. I wouldn’t wish this on anyone.”

******

“There are two dead people.”

Those chilling words on a 911 call just after midnight on Jan. 21 were the last that anyone heard retired fire inspector William Liebrich utter. He hung up and then, police believe, shot his wife of 30 years, Colleen, before turning the 12-gauge shotgun on himself.

When cops arrived at the Warwick, R.I., home they found a note on the front door saying it was safe to enter and that the couple’s two sons, Bill, 24, and Jeff, 21, should not be allowed in. There were also letters for the boys, unsigned but typed by William, police say.

Before that, the sons said, it had been just like any other day. When Bill left for soccer practice, his dad told him, “Have fun. Be safe, bud.” Jeff watched TV with his dad before meeting friends.

Family photo

Colleen and William Liebrich, in an undated family photo.

“The thing that was so shocking about the whole thing is that life was moving along as normal. There wasn’t a single red flag, there wasn’t anything to show that anything like this could possibly happen. … It still feels like a nightmare,” said Jeff, an information technology student.

But life hadn’t been easy for Colleen. The once-active soccer and karate mom was mostly bedridden in recent months by a range of ailments: pancreatitis, osteoporosis, schizophrenia. She had suffered a seizure, memory loss, confusion and falls.

Warwick Police Capt. Robert Nelson said her condition was not terminal, but Bill recalled his mother hitting “an all-time low, physically and mentally,” on Christmas.

The brothers believe their parents decided together to end their lives. They said their father had never owned a gun and they assume he bought one to carry out a pact.

“It wasn’t just the fact that, you know, she wasn’t getting better,” Bill said. “It was the fact that she was progressively getting worse.”

The police are continuing their investigation into what they have tentatively ruled a murder-suicide and waiting for a trace on where the shotgun came from.

Bill and Jeff are treasuring the good memories of their parents -- their dad playing secret Santa and giving money to families in need, the couple's love of animals, the launch of their mother's salon business, which she eventually gave up because of her health – while coping with sadness and anger.

“I can see where my dad was coming from and I hate to say it like that because I don’t agree with what he did or how he did it,” said Jeff. “But I know what he was doing and the whole point was to put her out of pain, and he did that and she’s not in pain. So there’s a bittersweetness to it. “

Asked if they felt the need to forgive their father, Jeff said, “Obviously our primary focus is that we don’t have our parents anymore. … And so as far as forgiveness, there’s no one there to forgive.”

*****

Her “baby” was turning 7 and Lydia Bradford wanted it to be a day she would remember. She had ordered the cake and was getting the house ready. Soon, the cousins would start arriving for the party.

Her three daughters, including the birthday girl, were playing in the front of her Cocoa, Fla., house with another kid when a man with a ski mask burst in, police said. The terrified children fled as the intruder stalked to the rear of the small house and opened fire on Bradford, 24, and her mother Equaller, 58.

The young mom was killed and Equaller Bradford, shot in the chest and head, is still clinging to life. The motive is unknown and there have been no arrests, though family members suggest the women may have been victims of mistaken identity.

At Lydia Bradford’s funeral, relatives remembered her as a bubbly, carefree single mother devoted to her kids.

Cocoa Police Dept.

Lydia Bradford, 24, was shot dead by a masked gunman who burst into the Cocoa, Fla., home she shared with her mother on Jan. 21.

“Lydia didn’t sweat the small stuff,” said her aunt, Yvonne Smith. “You could hate her, but she loved you back. She was as pretty on the inside as she was on the outside.”

She supported her kids by working as a private-duty nurse. She had recently moved in with her mother and they were looking for a bigger place. Her weekends were full of cookouts and card games with family.

When her uncle Melvin was feeling low after chemotherapy, Bradford’s smile would cheer him up, Smith said. She chuckled as she remembered her niece’s sweet tooth, how she tucked into the homemade sweet-potato pie, lemon meringue pie, banana pudding and cake at Thanksgiving – then complained she had eaten too much.

Because she was a working mother, Bradford tried to make sure that holidays and birthdays were special for her girls. She was planning a Feb. 7 party at Chuck E. Cheese for all the cousins with January birthdays.

“Instead, we were all at her funeral that day,” Smith said, her voice cracking. “I know things like this happen every day, but it’s just sad that someone don’t care no more for life and took my baby away from her girls.”

She worries in particular for the 7-year-old.

“That was her birthday and now she’ll associate that for the rest of her life with the day her mama was killed,” she said.

******

The chain of events that led to Christopher Best’s death began when a big maple tree fell on the corner of his house in the Detroit suburb of Redford, Mich., in early January.

Best, 61, a computer whiz who had done sound and lights for countless rock-and-roll shows in Motor City, hired an old buddy from the music scene, carpenter Chris O’Brien, to repair the roof.

A few weeks later, on the evening of Jan. 21, Best drove to O’Brien’s Detroit home, with his dog Maxi in tow, to pay him $1,000. It was considered a relatively safe neighborhood, a historic district of Victorian homes, and Best had visited many times.

Photo provided by friend

Chris Best, a Detroit music engineer, was slain on Jan. 21 while delivering money to the home of a friend who had done some construction work for him. Police believe the motive was robbery.

But this time, as Best got out of his car, he was “apparently ambushed” by robbers, police say. The sound of gunfire – O’Brien says police told him it was an AK-47 assault rifle-- shattered the dinnertime quiet on the tree-lined street.

“A dozen shots came into my house,” O’Brien recalled. “They were going by both sides of my head. If I would have taken one more step, my head would have been blown clear off.”

When the shooting stopped, he stepped outside and saw his friend of 30 years lying on his lawn. “It was cold that night,” O’Brien said. “I got down and put my arm under his head. He was gasping for air.”

Best, he said, died in the ambulance. No arrests have been made, but police say the motive was robbery.

An IT worker by day, Best’s passion was music. He played the guitar and keyboard and had a reputation as a reliable sound man in Detroit’s music joints. His obituary photo showed him mugging with Alice Cooper.

“He was a good guy, a pretty wholesome guy,” O’Brien. “He wasn’t into drugs, which is amazing for the rock and roll business. He didn’t even drink anymore.”

Best came from a large family; he was one of nine kids. And for years, the bachelor had been a foster parent, opening his home to young people in crisis and mentoring others, friend Sergio Sanchez said.

“He had a big heart,” Sanchez said. “That’s why it’s so hard to believe they shot him down because if they had given him the chance, I’m sure he would have just given them the money.”

******

It was just a fistfight.

Steven Rosalez, 16, got into a scuffle with an ex-con, Julius Short, 23, as he left a store with his friends in Pittsburg, Calif., his family says. It’s not known what prompted the fisticuffs, but when the fight  was over, the teen and the older man, who was on probation, went their separate ways.

The Rosalez Family

Steven Rosalez, 16, was killed by gunfire on Jan. 21 after an altercation outside a store in Pittsburg, Calif., allegedly by an ex-con he'd fought with earlier in the day.

That could have been the end of it. But according to police, Short wasn’t one to let it go. He got a gun, found Rosalez and shot him in the back and another 16-year-old in the leg, they said. The other boy survived, but Rosalez died.

“It’s devastated the whole family,” his mother, Wynette, said last Wednesday as Short was arraigned on charges of murder, attempted murder and weapons possession. He has not entered a plea.

She said her son was a happy boy growing up, always surrounded by friends and active in sports until he decided to give up football and baseball in the 10th grade. He was “kind of going through a little rough patch” and had run away from home once but had never been in trouble with the police, she said.

He spent most of his free time with his girlfriend of four years and playing Xbox. He had two brothers and a cousin he treated like a third. He was finishing high school in an independent study program and taking classes at a local college.

“He was loved,” she said, crying.

Short has a 2009 conviction for assault with a deadly weapon and he was on probation at the time of the slaying, which made Rosalez’s mother angry.

Complete coverage of "Flashpoint: Guns in America," an NBC News special report

“I grew up around guns and nobody did this when I was a kid and now here are these people who are felons and on probation and they get guns,” she said. “It’s not right.”

Also contributing to this story and map for NBC News: Daniel Arkin, Meredith Birkett, John Brecher, Bill Dedman, David Friedman, Kriss Chaumont, Polly DeFrank, Shezad Morani, Lisa Riordan Seville, Jonathan Sweeney and Lisa Wilkins.

More from Open Channel:

• Death takes no holiday: Tracking gun violence over one long January weekend
• Obama administration deliberating more cuts in nuclear weapons, sources say
• EXCLUSIVE: Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook 

Interactive map: A long weekend of gun deaths. Click to enlarge.

It was after midnight, early on a Saturday in the college town of Moscow, Idaho, and student Jason "Cowboy" Monson was at the police station to get back his Desert Eagle .45-caliber handgun.

In McDonough, Ga., about the same time, two teenage brothers were still awake. A friend was sleeping over, and their mother had let the boys handle her .38-caliber revolver, which was unloaded. She'd gone to bed.

In South Valley, N.M., it was quiet at the Griego household as 15-year-old Nehemiah waited for his father to come home from the night shift at a homeless shelter. The son was holding his father's AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

In the next few hours, the freshman in Idaho, one of the brothers in Georgia, and most of the Griego family would be dead, victims of three forms of gun violence — suicide, accident and murder — that are everyday occurrences in the United States.

Their deaths, and scores of others, occurred over a holiday weekend, the third weekend in January, when America celebrated the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a victim of gun violence. It also was the weekend the nation swore in a re-elected president whose inaugural address referred to guns, though he didn’t actually say the word: "Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm."

San Antonio Express-News via Zuma Press

One of 91 deaths identified by guns across America on a long holiday weekend: Officers with the Bexar County, Texas, Sheriff's Office investigate the shooting death of Jesse Rosas, whose bullet-riddled body was found on the side of a road near San Antonio on Jan. 21. Police have not identified any suspects.

By the end of the long weekend — after President Barack Obama had spoken and the red, white and blue confetti strewn along Pennsylvania Avenue had been cleaned up — at least 91 people across America had been killed by guns. That's more than three times the number of caskets needed in Connecticut after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School. These 91 people died, not in a single burst of violence over a few minutes, but spread over a three-day weekend, like an autoworker stealing an entire convertible one part at a time to escape notice.

In the aftermath of the Dec. 14 Newtown shooting, during a renewed national debate about gun rights and gun control, NBC News picked the weekend of Jan. 19-21 to examine gun deaths across America. Today and on Monday and Tuesday, we'll tell you what we found and introduce you to some of the victims and their families. We also invite you to look at our online map and to draw your own impressions from the stories of violence.

We don't pretend to have found all the gun deaths over that weekend. There is no official census of gun deaths, and it takes the federal government many months to compile national crime and suicide statistics. We drew our list from the deaths that were reported in the press, and confirmed the details with authorities in all but a few cases. If you only want to know how many people are killed by guns on an average day in America, simply divide the annual figure, about 31,300, by 365 days, and there's your average: about 86 people a day.

Why did we find “only” 91 in three days? The main reason is that hardly any suicides get reported in the media. Suicides by gun are twice as common as gun homicides. Some homicides don't get any publicity either. Unless a killer chooses a public place, annihilates an entire family or shoots up a Wal-Mart, he might not even get on a website, in the newspaper or on TV, not on a holiday weekend competing with the festivities in the nation's capital and the Ravens-Patriots and Falcons-Seahawks games. The Griego family massacre in New Mexico was the only incident that long weekend to get significant national news attention. It also could be that holiday weekends with NFL championships are safer, with so many young men – who are statistically far more likely to shoot someone — inside instead, watching the games.

Guns by the numbers: how violence adds up

Our goal was not, however, merely to count the deaths, but to share the stories of the people who died, to see what lessons one might learn from those whose deaths usually go unnoticed, that don't prompt the president to order the White House flag to half-staff.

#####

It's an inescapable conclusion, even from our small sample, that there are many ways to get killed with a gun in America.

Based on interviews with police, prosecutors and family members in all but a few of the cases, we tallied 53 homicides where one person killed another. There were another three homicides where multiple people were killed. There were six murder-suicides, and six suicides. Five accidental shootings. Three shootings by police, and at least two by civilians in self-defense. That's 78 horrors with 91 dead. On a different randomly chosen weekend, the count might shake out differently.

You can get killed throwing your daughter a 17th birthday party, if your angry estranged husband shows up. Without a gun, you might have an angry confrontation and maybe some tears. With a handgun, the birthday girl in Grapevine, Texas, lost her mother and father in a murder-suicide, police said.

Or you can get killed buying a taco from a vendor on the street in Los Angeles, if you get into an argument with the wrong person, and that person has a gun.

Or catching a train: A bystander was killed at a Bay Area Rapid Transit station in San Leandro, Calif., when a couple of gangs started trading shots.

You can get killed spending an afternoon with grandma. Just as the president was beginning his inaugural address and talking about making children safe, a gunman in Cocoa, Fla., burst into a home before a children's birthday party, shooting to death the mother of several of the children and seriously wounding their grandmother.

Or visiting a strip club. A U.S. Army soldier from Oklahoma's Fort Sill was killed outside a strip club during a dispute over a woman.

Manatee County Sheriff's Office

James Brady, 26, was shot and killed in Bradenton, Fla., Jan. 20, as he and two other masked men attempted to rob a resident in his carport, police said.  One alleged robber, Jared Lee, has been charged with felony murder in Brady's death. Authorities are seeking a third man, Charles Jones.

You can get killed for what may seem like like a pretty good reason, if, as the National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre put it after the Newtown shooting, you're a “bad guy with a gun” who happens to run into a “good guy with a gun.” There were two shootings by citizens that apparently were justified over the long weekend, including one by a man in Bradenton, Fla., who was ready with his own handgun and a concealed weapons permit when three armed robbers wearing masks confronted him and his roommate in their carport, according to police. He killed one of them, and authorities determined it was in self-defense. There also were three shootings by police officers that have tentatively been ruled as justified, including one in which an ex-con was shot dead after he threatened to kill his hostage following an armed robbery.

Las Vegas Police

Las Vegas Police Lt. Hans Walters, 52, killed his wife, former police officer Kathryn Michelle Walters, and their 5-year-old son, Maximilian, called 911 to confess and then set his house on fire on Jan. 21, according to police. Walters killed himself with the handgun as police moved in.

But as we saw last week when a former Los Angeles police officer allegedly went on a murderous rampage against fellow law enforcement officers, the “good guys” aren’t immune to the demons that trigger gun violence. Over the inaugural weekend, a Las Vegas police lieutenant used a handgun to kill his wife, herself a former police officer, and their 5-year-old son, before killing himself, according to police, just as the president was taking his seat on the West Front terrace of the U.S. Capitol on Monday morning.

You can get killed when your fists are outgunned, like the 22-year-old man who his family said was standing up for his friends in a brawl, when someone else pulled a gun and shot him dead, according to police. They were in Torrance, Calif., attending a punk rock festival headlined by a band called "Aggression."

You can become an ironic headline, like the 20-year-old man in Lafayette, La., who was shot dead about 60 yards from the Martin Luther King Jr. recreation center, on Monday, the day when Dr. King's legacy of nonviolence was being celebrated. That shooting occurred about the time the Obamas left the White House for their inaugural ball.

Or you can be ignored as just another victim of a street crime or a drug deal, barely making the local newspapers if you're killed in a "confrontation at a mobile home park" or "shot and killed in an argument in a parking lot."

#####

One of the surprises in our snapshot of gun violence was how young many of the victims were.

Oregon State Police

Kayla Ann Hendrickson, 16, was killed alongside an Oregon highway on Jan. 19, by her boyfriend, Jacob Allen Green, 24, after an argument, according to police. Green committed suicide near the California border, they said.

Twenty of the 91 were too young to buy a beer at a baseball game. There's the 16-year-girl in Oregon named Kayla, who was shot to death by the highway, apparently by her 24-year-old boyfriend, who then shot and killed himself with the handgun, according to police. The 6-year-old girl in Cleveland —  her name was Navaeh, and her family called her "Nae Nae" — who somehow got her hands on what police said was the illegal handgun of her felon father, and shot herself in the face. The 18-year-old in Baton Rouge, Terrance, who was playing with a .357 Magnum; when it went off, the bullet missed him, and hit his 2-year-old brother, Travin, in the chest.

It's hard to miss how male the victims are: Out of 91 dead, 75 were men or boys. And the men were even more likely to be the ones pulling the trigger.

There's no way to count them all, but the press accounts of these deaths are sprinkled with deadly encounters fueled by drugs and alcohol. We didn't trace the race or ethnicity of victims or shooters for this project; though research indicates that blacks and Hispanics are more likely to be involved in gun violence. But the cases over this weekend were not limited to "urban" violence, with the deaths happening in cities and small towns and suburbs across many class and ethnic groups.

Looking through the deaths from just that one weekend, one wonders how many of these deaths could have been prevented by the gun-control and gun-safety changes that are being discussed in Washington. There are no easy answers, but one can draw an overall conclusion: Because the types of gun deaths vary greatly, so the solutions would have to vary as well.

David Hemenway, a professor of health policy and management at the Harvard School of Public Health, says it will require a national mindset shift to make big inroads into the number of gun deaths, similar to the change that occurred in how child abuse – a condition once considered so endemic that it couldn’t be addressed – was viewed after new laws against it were passed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

"If it was in your safety to have a gun in the home, people in public health would try to get you to own a gun," he said last month at a forum on gun violence sponsored by the Harvard School of Public Health and the Reuters news agency. "But what evidence we have is that it's against your self interest."

Improvement in mental health efforts, as proposed by the president, might make a difference, particularly in the 12 suicides and murder-suicides. But many of the cases will forever remain a mystery.

Warwick, R.I., Police Capt. Robert Nelson, who is investigating the murder-suicide of a longtime married couple on the MLK Day weekend, said the law enforcement system is set up to find and punish wrongdoers, not determine root causes: “We don’t have clear motive, and you know, you rarely do,” he told NBC News. “… As seen around the country, when someone kills somebody else then kills themselves as a result of that, you very rarely have any clear motive.”

In the Griego family massacre in New Mexico, as in the Newtown school shooting, there still is no clear understanding of what may have driven a young man to commit mass murder. Nehemiah Griego, 15, is facing murder charges in adult court. Police say the minister's son shot his mother and three younger siblings with a .22-caliber rifle as they lay in their beds early on that Saturday, then waited to shoot his father with the father's military-style AR-15 rifle.

What about the proposal to take "weapons of war" — or assault-type weapons —  off the streets, as Obama put it? Police are reluctant to give out details of the type of weapon used in a crime, because that's the sort of fact that they can use when interrogating witnesses and suspects. You'll see a lot of "unknown" for gun type on our map, and we don't have reliable information in most deaths about whether a gun was purchased or owned legally. There are several cases in which guns were not possessed legally.

The weekend of gun violence does leave an impression that few crimes are committed with the assault weapons whose legality is being debated in Washington. We saw one Detroit homicide where a witness said the gun was an AK-47, but police won't say one way or another. And Nehemiah Griego is said to have used a .22-caliber rifle, then a .223-caliber military-style AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.

Most of the killing, however, is done with handguns that are not on the political radar, one or two victims at a time, not crimes that depend on high-capacity magazines with more than 10 bullets.

“Certainly I’m not naive enough to say that if we were to ban military-style assault rifles and if we were to ban high-capacity magazines, that we’re not going to have killings or murders," said George Gascón, the San Francisco district attorney, an advocate of banning those weapons and high-capacity magazines. He was discussing the death of Daniel Colon, 44, who was killed with an unknown weapon on the morning of the inauguration, as he was walking home with his cousin from a bar where he had celebrated the football victory by the 49ers. "All we’re saying is that we can reduce the mayhem, and we can have greater control to make sure that the people that own weapons do so in a lawful fashion.”

Accidental shootings of children may be the most preventable, when children get their hands on guns that adults have not secured.

In McDonough, Ga., where the mother was asleep, the sheriff's office says the mother had let the children handle her .38-caliber revolver earlier in the evening, when it was unloaded. Sometime in the night, one of the boys loaded the gun.

The mother was awakened around 2:30 a.m. by a gunshot.

The mother's 14-year-old son had pointed the gun at his 15-year-old brother's chest and squeezed the trigger, the sheriff’s office said. The sheriff and the district attorney haven't released the names of the boys, and say they haven't decided whether to charge the brother with a crime. The sheriff's office said it didn't consider charging the grieving mother, because her gun was legally owned.

Many gun owners say they need their guns to be at hand and ready in case of an intruder breaking in during the night. "You try to look at the science," Hemenway, the Harvard professor, said at the gun violence forum. "There's no evidence at all suggesting that having the gun that you can get within two seconds matters more than the gun you can get within 10 seconds. ... There is a huge amount of evidence that having an unsecured gun leads to all sorts of death in the family."

#####

Looking at the gun deaths across the land, on just one weekend, is a reminder how ingrained the gun culture is in America, a large part of the story the country tells about itself, especially in the way its young men find identity.

Consider Jason "Cowboy" Monson, the freshman from the University of Idaho who went down to the police station to get his gun back.

On Friday, just before our weekend clock began, Jason's roommate spoke with his resident adviser in the dorm, saying he was afraid because Jason was keeping his Desert Eagle handgun under his pillow.

Jason was raised on a small horse farm in Middleton, Idaho, hunting and fishing, playing football for a Christian school. He was raised around guns. Jason's father is a county sheriff's patrol sergeant, and his mother is a former Boise police officer. (His parents did not respond to a request from NBC News for an interview.) Jason won a national speech competition with 4H, and was studying communications. He was also in the Air Force ROTC and hoped to serve his country. He had a new girlfriend and a sense of humor, and posted a lot of funny stuff on his Facebook page.

His online summary of himself was unassuming: "im a total cowboy. I hunt cowboy mounted shoot and drive an old ford diesel. Ive broken several bones and most recently chainsawed my foot, that was a great two months, insert sarcasm. I own several guns and will be in the ROTC at the u of I this fall. any questions message me."

Family photo

Jason Monson aims a blank pistol at the camera. Jason, who grew up on a small horse farm in Idaho, was active in Cowboy Mounted Shooting, which uses blanks.

Cowboy Mounted Shooting looks like a lot of fun. (Watch a primer on YouTube.) The riders train skilled horses and compete on an obstacle course, wearing a Western long-sleeved shirt and a cowboy hat and shooting guns loaded with powder cartridges--blanks--at ballooons. Jason had already won a couple of belt buckles. One of his fellow competitors described him as "very nice, respectful, personable and outgoing." It's a great sport for someone who likes people, horses, and guns.

When the roommate reported the gun, Jason was not at the dorm. The school called the city police, and an officer came and took the gun away. The police chief in Moscow (for non-Idahoans: that's "MOS-ko"), David Duke, said there was no hint that Jason had made any threat against anyone, and Jason wasn't in a whole lot of trouble.

After all, this is Idaho, where guns are freely allowed with no registration, and one can openly carry a gun without any permit. Jason had violated no criminal law by bringing his handgun to his dorm room, the police chief said. It was against the school rules to have it there — students have to keep their guns in the central gun locker provided by the school. Jason could have faced student judicial charges, but it wasn't a criminal matter.

When Jason got back to the dorm, his roommate had been moved to another room, and Jason was told that his gun had been confiscated. He called the Moscow police about 10 p.m. to get his gun back, and the officer asked him to come down to the station. He came down about 1 a.m., and the officer said he could have his gun, but not until Tuesday, after the MLK holiday, so he'd have a chance to lock it up at school.

At 8:46 a.m. local time Sunday morning, just as the Obama family was participating in a day of service by fixing up an elementary school in the nation's capital, Moscow police got another call from the University of Idaho, from the same dorm.

One of Jason's suitemates had found him, shot in the head, next to notes he'd written to his family.

Idaho has one of the highest rates of suicides in the country, mostly from guns. It also was the only state in the union without its own certified hotline with counselors trained in suicide prevention; a hotline opened in November, but it's open  only Monday through Thursday, 9 to 5. Chief Duke says he gets a call about suicide on campus every couple of years or so.

It turned out that the Desert Eagle .45 was not Jason's only gun. Sometime in the night, he'd gone out to his pickup truck for his Smith and Wesson Model 66 .357-caliber revolver.

'Flashpoint: Guns in America,' an NBC News special report 

In his obituary, his parents took the opportunity to plead against gun control: "Let us drag the evil hiding in the darkness of the most dangerous places on earth: Gun free zones."

Jason's photo with his obituary shows Cowboy Monson with a big grin, wearing a black hat and astride a reddish-brown horse at a canter. Jason is looking directly at the camera, where he is pointing his blank pistol.

That image is the profile photo atop his Facebook page, too, now and perhaps forever, along with the cover image of two semi-automatic rifles criss-crossed over the U.S. Constitution.

Read Part 2: The faces behind the numbers: Six victims of long weekend's violence

 Also contributing to this story and map for NBC News: Daniel Arkin, Meredith Birkett, John Brecher, David Friedman, Kriss Chaumont, Tracy Connor, Polly DeFrank, Matthew DeLuca, Miranda Leitsinger, Shezad Morani, Lisa Riordan Seville, Jonathan Sweeney and Lisa Wilkins.

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• Obama administration deliberating more cuts in nuclear weapons, sources say
• EXCLUSIVE: Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans
• After ethics complaint, Sen. Menendez pays $58,500 for flights to Dominican Republic

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook 

Mel Evans / AP

Officers from the Mercer County Prosecutor's Office work at a two-day gun buyback event in Trenton, N.J., on Jan. 26. People were allowed to drop off weapons with no questions asked.

On average, about 86 people a day are killed by firearms in America, or 31,672 per year, according to the Centers for Disease Control tally for 2010, the latest year available.

That year, the CDC counted 19,392 gun deaths by suicide, 11,078 homicides with firearms, 606 deaths by accidental shootings and 596 with other or undetermined cause. (Read the full report.)

A child aged 5 through 14 in America is about 13 times more likely to be murdered with a gun than children in Japan, Italy or other industrial countries, according to the Harvard School of Public Health. (Watch the Harvard forum on gun violence.)

Larry W. Smith / EPA

Guns lie in a chair at the First Presbyterian Church parking garage in Dallas during a gun buyback program on Jan. 19, 2013. Across the street, gun-rights advocates were offering to auction off guns at higher prices.

Guns are used in about seven out of 10 murders in the U.S., according to FBI statistics. The weapons of choice are guns, 68 percent; knives, 13 percent; fists or feet, 6 percent; other, 6 percent; and unknown, 7 percent. (See other statistics in a chart from The Dallas Morning News.)

The crime rate has been declining steadily for firearm crimes. In 1993 and 1994, for example, the rate was above seven firearm crimes for every 1,000 people age 12 or older. It has fallen pretty consistently to 1.8 in 2011, the most recent year for which statistics have been tallied, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Even in Chicago, which has a strict gun control law and received a lot of publicity in recent months for a spike in homicides, the number of killings has declined sharply over the past 20 years. The number was consistently above 800 in the early 1990s, but fell to the 700s, to the 600s in the early 2000s, and near 500 or below for every year since 2004, according to a report by the Chicago Police Department.

There is considerable disagreement among researchers, however, on whether the high-rate of U.S. gun ownership has a direct correlation to violent crimes and, if so, what it's impact might be. Here's a recent analysis by FactCheck.org that does a good job covering that terrain.

Related story

A look at some nations' gun ownership rates.

Death takes no holiday: Tracking gun violence over one long January weekend

Thirty-three percent of American households have a gun. That rate varies from Georgia's 41 percent down to New Jersey's 11 percent, according to a 2002 federal survey.

Here are some civilian firearm ownership percentages for selected countries, according to The Small Arms Survey: Germany, 30 per 100 residents; Iceland, 30; Austria, 30; Canada, 31; Iraq, 34; Saudi Arabia, 35; Switzerland, 46; Yemen, 55; United States, 89.

More from Open Channel:

• Obama administration deliberating more cuts in nuclear weapons, sources say
• EXCLUSIVE: Justice Department memo reveals legal case for drone strikes on Americans
• After ethics complaint, Sen. Menendez pays $58,500 for flights to Dominican Republic

Follow Open Channel from NBCNews.com on Twitter and Facebook