Does The Violence Project Know Anything About Gun Violence?

Yesterday, Joe Biden visited the families of several cops who were shot and killed earlier this week in Charlotte, and although he made the trip in a quiet way to avoid being attacked for ‘politicizing’ another terrible instance of gun violence, he did manage to say something about how gun violence needed to come to an end.

In that regard, I just finished reading a book published by two academics in Minnesota, who run something called The Violence Project, the book’s title is How To Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic and was published in 2021.

By coincidence, today I received an email from this group talking about a survey that have completed on gun violence exposure, i.e., how many Americans have either been directly affected by a shooting either as victims, or as onlookers, or as family or friends connected to someone involved in a gun violence event.

Jillian Peterson two academic researchers who head this effort, James Densley and Jillian Peterson, have now changed the project’s name slightly, their website saying that they are running the Viole3nce Prevention Project, which they claim will reduce violence through research.

To illustrate the severity of mass shootings in the United States, the website contains a very detailed database which describes 193 mass shootings…