Tallying the Best Stats on US Gun Violence Is Trauma of Its Own
Mark Bryant helped start his organization because nobody else was tracking the country’s carnage in real time. His dedication has come at a cost.
Dan Kois was a new editor at the online publication Slate when the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, happened in late 2012. Twenty of the victims were 6- and 7-year-olds. Kois, who has a child who was then about the same age, says, “It really freaked me out.” A data journalist by trade, he went looking for numbers about gun violence in the US but “kept running into a bunch of brick walls, different numbers in different states, and different numbers that seemed shockingly old and out of date.”
Tens of thousands of shootings take place every year in the US. Some, such as the one on Oct. 25 in Lewiston, Maine, get a lot of attention because of high casualty and injury figures and an ensuing manhunt; others, like the one the next day that left five people dead in Clinton, North Carolina, don’t. And yet regardless of how sensational the episodes are, no one federal agency keeps track of them. Data is siloed, which makes it difficult to study a public-health crisis that kills more kids annually than cancer, drug overdoses or car accidents.