The Gun Violence Archive is the preferred source for information among almost every media outlet I seem to come across. There are a handful of exceptions, but those are generally outlets that have their own tracking efforts.
Interestingly, every single one of those tends to have a far lower number of things like mass shootings than the Gun Violence Archive has.
Now, I’m a fan of data. I think data is useful in so many ways. However, data can also be manipulated. It can be misrepresented by being shown out of context. It can just be incomplete. It can also be gathered using biased criteria, which will skew the results.
And when it comes to the Gun Violence Archive, creator Mark Bryant opened up about why he created his archive, and it’s a little telling.
By about 11am most days, Bryant can be found sitting in front of his two computer screens, reviewing the latest shootings and updating the database. He typically works until about 4am the next day, sipping on Coke and iced tea. “I can tell I’ve worked too long when out the window of my office I can see sunrise,” he says. What keeps him going through the early morning hours – apart from caffeine – is the same drive that prompted him to start the organisation in 2013, after a health scare made him think hard about how he wanted to spend the remainder of his working life. He’d previously worked as a data and systems analyst.
“We’d had several shootings in the US that were bothering me greatly … what was really bothering me was the fact that media and law enforcement and politicians were all using different sets of figures,” he says, adding that authorities don’t typically release statistics until months after incidents occur. The Gun Violence Archive is usually updated within 24 hours of a shooting. Bryant believes that providing up-to-date details can help inform how politicians respond to gun violence.
The emphasis is mine, but it’s important.
See, we know that Bryant uses an overly broad definition of “mass shooting” that includes so many other things beyond what we tend to think of as a typical mass shooting, and now he’s telling us what is purpose of all of this is. It’s to sway politicians to “respond to gun violence.”
When you consider how he overcounts, which I talked about earlier today, it’s hard to see this as any unbiased effort to present the information so politicians could just make informed decisions. He inflates the numbers by orders of magnitude, all to make the issue look worse than it is.
For data to be useful, it really needs to be collected and presented as neutrally as possible. That’s especially true if you just want to make sure politicians have the best information possible so they can reach their conclusions.
Manipulating it like this is what you do when you want to “guide” them to what you think is the correct conclusion.
As if there weren’t enough reason to dismiss the Gun Violence Archive as yet another anti-gun entity trying to pretend they’re just looking at the data…
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