'Black Friday Death Count' Website Exists

Bustle previously reported on this year’s Black Friday atrocities, which included a cop getting dragged by a shoplifter’s car and a man being shot in the leg for a television. It’s all par for the course in America's proud tradition of assaulting strangers during the holidays in order to buy more consumer goods, but for all of the hubbub about Black Friday violence, it’s worth asking how many people have actually been injured in shopping-related incidents on the day after Thanksgiving. In fact, the Los Angeles-based programer Travis Dent has already set out to answer that question with a website, BlackFridayDeathCount.com

Dent’s site contains an ongoing count of how many people have been a) killed and b) injured during Black Friday-related violence, along with the relevant news links. If the figures are correct — and Dent is confident that it is, citing an ongoing stream of “referral and correction stories — 4 people have been killed in Black Friday violence since 2006, and 75 have been injured. That’s inexcusable and shameful, no question, but in the grand scheme of things, those are pretty small figures. For example, in 2011, around 3.7 people were killed every hour in car accidents.

According to Dent, he bought the domain in 2008 after hearing for the first time about people getting killed on Black Friday, and it’s intended not as “a strong political message,” but simply to be “thought provoking.”

“I am enjoying the commentary it’s sparking,” Dent told Business Insider.

Note: Since I started writing this article, the number of deaths has increased by one, while the number of injuries has gone up by five.