Explainer

 

The Explainer

This area of GVA is to provide explanations as to why we do some of the things we do and to provide a more in-depth explanation for some of our more common FAQs.

Use of Gun Violence Archive Data
 

Data from the Gun Violence Archive is copyrighted, and our data aggregation is proprietary. Our data is not in the public domain or subject to Creative Commons licensing. 

Anyone is allowed to use GVA data either by utilizing the query function and adhering to the limits of that process or contacting GVA for either partnership licensing or use agreement.

Mass Shooting Methodology and Reasoning

Mass Shootings are, for the most part an American phenomenon. While they are generally grouped together as one type of incident they are several different types including public shootings, bar/club incidents, family annihilations, drive-by, workplace and those which defy description but with the established foundation definition being that they have a minimum of four victims shot, either injured or killed, not including any shooter who may also have been killed or injured in the incident. GVA also presents the count of Mass Murder which, like the FBI's definition is four or more victims, killed, not including the shooter. Mass Murder by gun is a subset of the Mass Shooting count. 

Suicides
Suicides are not part of GVA's normal data collection procedures. Individual suicides are collected through the CDC's Annual Report and, because of privacy and CDC policy, they are only available as an aggregate number, without detail. Therefore, there is not an associated table with our normal GVA level of granularity and geolocation. Suicides associated with Officer Involved incidents and Murder-Suicides are included in our tallies and the total number is adjusted when we receive the CDC reports to avoid duplication in the count. 

EDIT: February 15, 2024: GVA made the decision to remove the SUICIDE numbers from our Summary Ledger because, unlike our normal data collection, these numbers have been based on the CDC's trending extrapolations of suicide numbers rather than actual numbers and are not as timely or accurate as GVA prefers.  We will be working with CDC to come up with a more accurate and timely, verified set of suicide data to better reflect the very serious suicide problem in this country. 

IP Blocks
Some people are experiencing an IP BLOCK when visiting gunviolencearchive... The block is being issued by Amazon Web Services and/or Cloudflare [one of the "middlemen" of how a networks does security]. It is NOT a GVA filter. 

GVA believes that either AWS or Cloudflare did a software update and did not adjust the filtering correctly. We are working with them on that situation until it is resolved. 

We have also found that, if you use a VPN it increases the chance you will get an IP Block. Apparently some VPNs have a bad reputation for hackers and spammers and scrapers and security sofware just blocks the entire VPN rather than go after the bad actors. 

We are sorry for your inconvenience. We are working to resolve the issue.  

Defensive Gun Use

Gun Violence Archive looks at Defensive Gun Use [DGU] as an important data point in the national discussion of gun violence.

GVA makes every effort to include every verifiable incident that is found through normal GVA methodologies. GVA defines DGU as “The reported use of force with a firearm to protect and defend oneself or family. GVA does not “condition” the count by only logging those incidents where someone is shot or killed. Incidents where a gun was shown to deter a crime is also a valid instance of DGU. Our ONLY criterium in collection is that it can be verified by police sources. Verification is accomplished by multiple sources including media reports, police reports, police press conferences, semi-annual or annual aggregate police reports from the top 150 cities.

We are limited to incidents which have been reported and in which law enforcement coded the incident to reflect a DGU.  We cannot count incidents which have not been reported for the very obvious reason that if there is no paper trail, there is nothing to count.
 

Questions arise about differing “counts” of Defensive Gun Use…most published numbers are not counts but rather extrapolations of surveys which vary widely and have never been proofed through actual count by those presenting those numbers. Our position is that if an incident is significant enough that a responsible gun owner fears for their life and determines a need to threaten or use lethal force, it is significant enough to report to police so law enforcement can stop that perpetrator from harming someone else. 

Collecting Demographic Characteristics

The Gun Violence Archive does not, by policy collect some personal demographics of victims or suspects.  Examples of personal characteristics which we do not collect include race, ethnicity, religious affiliation, political affiliation, income, education, marital status, sexual orientation, disability status, and psychiatric diagnosis. The primary reason we do not collect these datapoints is that, when we are building a near real-time report, most of that information is not available. Some of it is covered by privacy laws and some by law enforcement policy. Much is just not germane to the incident.

The two most common questions we have regarding demographic characteristics are race and psychiatric diagnosis.  To break those down, we don't collect race identifiers because in the first few days after an incident, while police know the race of victims, privacy rules can come into play such as Marsy's Law or HIPAA which can keep some details of a victim private, especially if the victim is "only" injured. With suspects/perpetrators, we do not always know who the shooters are, as they are either found and arrested at a later date OR, never found at all.  The FBI says that law enforcement only clears 64% of cases, which means they don't know who the perpetrator is in 1/3 of murder cases.

Many of the same privacy issues block the public from knowing the psychiatric diagnosis of a suspect.  In some cases the information is given at trial, but not always. Police are also very reluctant to present "medication" lists for perpetrators.

Because GVA cannot collect a 90%+ collection of those type data, we do not collect it.  Having incomplete data from which conclusions can be drawn is poor statistical methodology and we don't practice that in our collection policies.

Last Edit: 02,15,2024  M