The Coalition for Gun Control was founded in the wake of the Montreal Massacre in 1989. It was formed to support strategies to reduce gun death, injury and crime and make Canada safer.
Despite the Coalition’s work, Canada has experienced a staggering rise in gun violence and shooting deaths in the last five years. The rate of gun-related crime has increased by 42% since 2013, and in the Toronto area specifically, phrases like “Year of the Gun” are used to describe a grim reality of an ever-increasing number of senseless fatalities.
As an advocate for gun reform, the Coalition is relentless in its efforts to battle gun violence. The objective for their latest effort is to reduce public complacency about an issue that risks becoming commonplace because of its increasing frequency.
The never-ending headlines about yet another shooting death are horrific. Yet, at the same time, as the headlines generate concern and even fear among Torontonians, they have two surprising and unintended consequences.
First, they start to make these incidents feel increasingly normal. What used to be a rare occurrence now feels commonplace and, as a result, there’s a risk that gun deaths will start to lose their impact.
Second, in a large city, the chance of any one individual being personally affected is low, which makes the impact feel a bit distant. People read a headline or hear a news report and feel shocked, but unless an incident happens close to home, it feels a bit removed from their own lives. But that response is false comfort, because the truth is that all of us have been too close to gun violence.
The insight: Gun violence is a lot closer to you than you realize.
Dodgethebullet.ca transforms public-domain data into a compelling and highly personalized user experience that vividly demonstrates just how close every Torontonian is to major gun violence.
To make the issue of gun violence leap from the theoretical to the personal, we built a web and mobile app that requires viewers to take one simple action: type their home address into the search bar. That search immediately pulls the information from the Public Safety Data Portal and instantly calculates the distance to the nearest incident of gun violence. The user then sees a message that says, for example, “You dodged a bullet by 152 metres.”
The action at the core of dodgethebullet.ca is powerful because it’s universal: basic search. This tool provides all citizens with the ability to immediately understand how close guns are to their lives.
By clicking on links to social media platforms, visitors to the site can share a satellite image of the city and its neighbourhoods, along with the prompt: find out how close you were to a shooting.
Users are further directed to triggerchange.ca where they are encouraged to message their local Member of Parliament to call for a national ban on the civilian ownership of handguns and military assault weapons.
Dodgethebullet.ca makes an issue that seems distant feel much, much closer to home.
Even though the website has only recently launched, it’s been picked up by CTV NEWS and there are already conversations about its potential to go far beyond the city that inspired it. As Wendy Cukier, president of the Coalition for Gun Control said, “There’s huge potential for Dodge the Bullet to be picked up by other communities outside of Canada as well. Many, many places around the world have the same problem we have.”
