23 officers have lost their lives to gun violence in 2015

CHICAGO (FOX 32 News) - A total of 23 officers have now lost their lives to gun violence this year alone, and eight officers died in just the past 10 days.

Lt. Joe Gliniewicz is the latest officer to fall in the line of duty.

Last Friday, Sheriff's Deputy Darren Goforth was ambushed as he was pumping gas in Houston, Texas.

“Our assumption is that he was a target because he wore a uniform. At this moment we found no other motive or indication that this was anything other than that,” said Sheriff Ron Hickman of Harris County.

On August 26, 51-year-old Officer Henry Nelson was shot responding to a house where three women had been stabbed in Louisiana.

Just two days before that, 43-year-old Louisiana State Trooper Steven Vincent was shot and killed during a traffic stop.

“It seems like you more and more hear of it happening somewhere in the country. And like I said, these guys and their families, they wake up, expecting to be home that night, and then things like this happen, and everybody's life is changed after that.”

In Memphis, Tennessee, Officer Sean Bolton was shot and killed during a drug investigation on August 1. The killer eluded officers for days, until turning himself in.

Back in May, a routine traffic stop ended in a shootout that killed Officers Benjamin Deen and Liqouri Tate in Mississippi.

"You can't have these kind of events happening in the community and you solve them in a matter of hours, but I think what we need to do now is celebrate the lives of these two individuals," said Mayor Johnny Dupree.

These are just a few of the 23 officers killed by gunfire this year. The average age of the fallen officers is 40, with an average of 12 years on the force.

Over the past ten years, an average of 51 officers were shot and killed each year. That number has remained relatively constant for decades.

But go back 40 years, to 1975, 144 officers lost their lives to gunfire that year.