A lot of them you spend three minutes on, because you know which ones are going to have gun violence as a headline and which ones are going to require you to do a deeper search on their site.Įvery once in a while we make errors, but we usually get them corrected. She’s got Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, so she may hit 200 sites a day. I’ll use one of my staffers as an example. We also hit police sources: police Twitter, police Facebook, police websites. Some of them have paywalls, so we have subscriptions to entirely too many media. It’s everything from The New York Times to Hey Jackass. We have a master list of 7,500 sites that we go to daily. What’s it like during a typical shift at GVA? We also have secondary funding from a couple of other folks. We now get funding from Michael Klein, who co-founded the Sunlight Foundation. So that was $7,500 that let me hire my first person at Gun Violence Archive. Later on down the pike, I sold them for $2,500 each to a 70-year-old guy that collects guns. Well, he had not put any caveats on it, so he begrudgingly gave me those three. I looked at it and picked three Colt Pythons, which I knew had a very, very high value. But he said, “Pick you three guns.” He had like 800 guns. I had done some database work for a guy, and I handed him a bill, but he didn’t want to pay me. I don’t think most people in gun violence prevention have a clue as to how guns are used as a currency. But nothing happened, and that caused me to get really pissed. I was sure that would be the game-changer that finally brought about reforms. I’m a gun owner who understands gun regulations, and I knew there had to be solutions that people weren’t paying attention to. While I was in the Intensive Care Unit, I got to thinking and decided that I had one good job left in me. I was hospitalized from late 2011 through early 2012 for a blood clot. So you were a retired computer systems analyst, you emailed Slate and said, “You’re missing people in your tally.” What made you want to be the person who filled in those gaps? Mark Bryant, the founder of Gun Violence Archive. The conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. ![]() In a recent interview, Bryant revealed the surprising origins of the project - he got the money to hire his first employee by selling guns - and shared his thoughts on why the media is embracing a more expansive definition of mass casualty rampages. By the end of 2013, Bryant had taken over the project and turned it into GVA. ![]() He found incidents Slate had missed and emailed the editor. Slate’s efforts prompted Mark Bryant, 66, a retired computer systems analyst and lifelong gun owner in Lexington, Kentucky, to begin compiling his own figures. GVA is an outgrowth of a project launched by Slate in the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre to provide an accurate accounting of how many people were shot each day. GVA makes its data available free of charge on its website. Its staff of two dozen researchers culls news articles and police reports to provide up-to-date figures on mass shootings, defensive gun use, suicides, and other categories of gun violence. While federal and state tallies of gun injuries and deaths can take more than a year to be released, GVA tracks shootings in close to real-time. But amid back-to-back high-profile gun rampages this spring in Atlanta, Boulder, Colorado, and Indianapolis, several mainstream media organizations - including The New York Times, USA Today, NPR, and CNN - are using GVA’s broader definition. News outlets have long relied on the FBI’s definition in reporting on the prevalence of mass shootings. That differs from the FBI’s definition of mass murder, which only counts incidents that lead to four or more people being killed, by guns or any other means. GVA defines mass shootings as incidents in which bullets hit four or more people, regardless of whether any of them die. The source of those figures is the nonprofit Gun Violence Archive (GVA), an increasingly sought-after resource for gun violence statistics. Shortly after the May 26 shooting at a San Jose, California, light rail yard, which left nine people dead, national media outlets seized on a pair of sobering statistics: The rampage was the 232nd mass shooting in 2021, and the 17th mass shooting in the U.S.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |