After finding holes in national gun statistics in the wake of Sandy Hook, Mark Bryant, who has been shooting guns since he was five, decided to keep track himself. Since 2014, he’s recorded more than 100,000 incidents

The “good guy with a gun”. He’s armed with a concealed-carry permit at home and a loaded pistol at his side. To hear fervent gun rights advocates tell it, he uses his gun to defuse tense, violent situations and keep those around him safe all the time.

It’s a storyline reinforced by groups such as the National Rifle Association, whose vocal leader Wayne LaPierre has perpetuated the mantra: “The only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

But if there’s an adversary the good guy with a gun isn’t on the lookout for, it’s Mark Bryant. A native of Harlan County, Kentucky, Bryant stands 6ft 1in with long hair and a bushy white beard. He’s an avid shooter, a former NRA member who likes to destress at the local gun range by “killing paper”, as he puts it.

Bryant collects handguns. Revolvers, mostly, but the occasional pistol as well, such as the one he used to pass his test to get a concealed-carry permit. He also collects gun violence data. From his home office in Lexington, Kentucky, Bryant has developed what is by some measures the most comprehensive database of recent gun deaths and injuries in America.

More than 13,000 people were shot and killed last year alone, with twice as many injured, according to the Gun Violence Archive, the not-for-profit group Bryant founded. Since 2014, Bryant’s team has recorded more than 100,000 incidents, including those where a gun is used in public and no one is hurt. Instances of “defensive gun use” – ie a good guy with a gun who made a difference – accounted for less than 3%.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Mark Bryant of the Gun Violence Archive. Photograph: Courtesy of Mark Bryant

“The math is staggering,” Bryant said.

Bryant, 61, has been around guns his entire life. He learned to shoot when he was five years old, and joined the NRA as a Boy Scout so he could access members-only gun ranges. Back then, the NRA was more of a marksmanship and gun safety organization than the political powerhouse it has morphed into today. Recently, Bryant noticed a shift in the politics of gun owners that didn’t seem to take the steady drumbeat of gun violence into account.



“They stopped going for a solution, but rather for their side to ‘win’, with everybody having to absolutely trash the other side to make their point,” Bryant said. “That bothers me on a systemic level. Just deep down, that bothers me.”

Bryant is a retired computer systems analyst. He first started looking closely at gun deaths while following Slate magazine’s tally in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Newtown, Connecticut. Doing his own research, he kept finding missing bodies that hadn’t been counted.



“I called them up and said, ‘You’ve got these gaps,’” Bryant said. As people continued shooting each other, Bryant realized a basic piece of information was absent from the increasingly contentious gun debate in America: an accurate accounting of the human toll of gun violence as it happened.

Rather than use an automated algorithm to tally the carnage, Bryant developed an old-school system to manually trawl the internet for any mention of a gun or shooting. He scanned media outlets, coroner’s offices and law enforcement press releases online. Each time he found a death that wasn’t included in the map that Slate updated daily, Bryant emailed Chris Kirk, an editor at Slate who oversaw the data collection.

With a small staff and limited resources, Kirk knew he wasn’t capturing as much data as he could. So he started relying on volunteers to report incidents. Almost by default, Bryant began to organize the volunteers, divvying up responsibilities and helping Kirk solve problems. The gun deaths kept adding up.

“Eventually, they got tired of me and gave me the keys,” Bryant said.



Bryant took over the Slate project in late 2013, when he secured funding from philanthropist and open government advocate Mike Klein. Since then, Bryant and his wife, Sharon, have assembled a small team of research analysts who, with an annual budget of about $500,000, have quietly created a database intended to collect information the government isn’t capturing.

The data is updated daily, and includes common categories of violence, such as mass shootings, child deaths and accidental shootings. The group also tracks incidents in which no one is hurt but a gun was involved, such as a home invasion or a bar fight where someone brandishes a gun.

The numbers form the foundation of research that influences policy decisions and, eventually, Bryant hopes, can change the public perception of guns. Bryant isn’t “for or against” gun ownership. He’s simply trying to reduce gun violence by building a better understanding of what guns are to America.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I called them up and said, “You’ve got these gaps,”’ Bryant said of Slate’s tally. Photograph: Helen H. Richardson/Denver Post via Getty Images

Bryant’s numbers have been cited in presidential debates, local, state and federal policy discussions and in the same media outlets where much of his data are drawn from. The data dispels two common myths about gun violence. First, that it’s strictly an urban, or big city, problem. The second myth, and one that’s made Bryant a target of gun rights advocates arguing that more guns equals less crime, is the notion that a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun is a common occurrence.

It’s clear from Bryant’s data that there aren’t anywhere near the 1-2.5m instances of defensive gun use per year that gun rights advocates claim. Those figures, unlike Bryant’s, are based largely on the results of a survey taken more than 20 years ago. Because it’s an estimate, there’s no way to verify the incidents, something advocates attribute to the nature of crime reporting.

“The logic that they use that says, ‘Well most of them just aren’t reported, we just walk away happy that we kicked ass.’ That’s baloney,” Bryant said, arguing that if a gun owner used their gun defensively, it doesn’t make sense to not report that to law enforcement and, in turn, create a record that could be picked up by researchers and added to the archive. “That’s very illogical.”

Many states have made it easier to carry a gun in public, with statistics linking concealed-carry permit holders, which make up less than 5% of the population, to a decrease in violent crime. And while the percentage of households that own a gun is down, individual gun ownership is at an all-time high.

“The price of freedom,” Bryant said. “That’s essentially the argument for more guns.”

Unlike numerous other efforts to track gun violence that began after shootings like the one at Sandy Hook, Bryant doesn’t rely on crowdsourcing or an automated algorithm.

Instead, researchers comb through more than 1,200 media websites each day, looking for obituaries, crime stories and any mention of a gun. It’s a tedious process, and one meticulously managed by Bryant, who often calls contacts at local law enforcement and coroner’s offices to verify that a gun was involved in a homicide, for example, rather than some other weapon. Still, Bryant will be the first to tell you it’s an imperfect system.

“We have two rules at Gun Violence Archive,” Bryant said. “One is accuracy; that’s paramount. And the other is discretion.”

In some cases, categorizing an incident can be more difficult than confirming it happened. Bryant steers clear of race, an element included by other independent efforts to track aspects of gun violence, such as officer-involved shootings. Bryant also doesn’t want to get caught up in political debates that have nothing to do with guns, such as abortion. If a pregnant woman is shot and killed, for example, she counts as one death in the archive.

“To me, a life begins when you get a piece of paper with your name on it,” Bryant said.

Although the government keeps tabs on violent crime, it doesn’t track violence for the sake of understanding the role of guns. The FBI tracks violent crime and breaks down incidents by the type of weapon involved, such as knife or gun. But the data are reported by local law enforcement, and widely considered an incomplete assessment of gun violence. The most comprehensive government data on gunshot victims is maintained by the Centers for Disease Control. But collecting the information is expensive and, as a result, not all states report their numbers, making it impossible to get a complete tally.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The more sources we have, the better.’ An officer collects one of numerous bullet casings in a 7/11 parking lot. Photograph: Robert Gauthier/LA Times via Getty Images

Gun deaths in your district: what have your elected representatives done? Read more

“You need good data,” said Garen Wintemute, an ER doctor who has studied the epidemiology of gun violence for decades. “I think the more sources we have the better. The key is, we need to know how good the data are. So people who are collecting data have a responsibility to publish their methodology.”

Each of Bryant’s dozen or so employees gets a 40-page manual explaining what to collect and how to categorize it. Archive researchers are assigned geographic areas of the country, which helps them quickly become familiar with the best sources of information. It’s similar to how a beat cop might get to know his or her neighborhood, except this neighborhood exists almost entirely on the internet.



When news reports don’t detail whether a death involved a gun, Bryant and his staff do their own follow-up inquiries to find out. Bryant recalls a gruesome murder-suicide in Florida a couple years ago, when a man killed his wife and son before taking his own life. None of the initial media reports described how the attack happened. So Bryant did his own reporting, only to find out that the man stabbed his wife to death, shot his son with a bow and arrow and hanged himself. Since there was no gun involved, the incident was never added to the archive.

While Bryant’s team continues to find ways to collect more detailed data, he still relies on other entities to disseminate it. The archive’s website is bare bones. Most of the time, when you read about Bryant’s numbers it’s in a news report. That’s because he publishes aggregate subsets of the data online, and takes additional inquiries by request, often with specific parameters in mind.

Bryant’s staff divides data by congressional boundaries, making it easy to isolate incidents in a district. Doing this allows Bryant to tell lawmakers, “This is the gun violence in your area.”



“When you have someone against any regulation whatsoever, and you give them these incidents in their backyard, it pushes them to either say ‘I don’t care,’ or to come up with a rational solution to the problem,” Bryant said.

In addition to providing geographic context, the archive drills down on individual incidents, with categories for hate crime, domestic violence and bystanders killed, among others.



His goal is to present facts to people who aren’t on either extreme of the gun spectrum.

Bryant sees a growing ideological divide as the biggest hurdle to reducing gun violence.

“That bothers me more than anything. That this has become so fractured,” he said.

Amanda Gailey, an English professor and founder of Nebraskans Against Gun Violence, which has used Bryant’s data in its research, said Bryant can be an “uneasy fit with our movement in that he actually quite likes a lot of gun people. He’s friends with them, he will defend the culture that values firearms.

“It takes a while to realize that he’s exactly the kind of person we need in the gun reform push,” Gailey said. “He’s fact-based, fact-driven. He doesn’t go for the easy jibes at gun culture, and he is a bridge between what could be meaningful gun reform and the reality of American culture.”

For more on Mark Bryant and the toll of gun violence in the US, listen to the new episode of Reveal, produced by the Center for Investigative Reporting and PRX.

An accompanying podcast version of this story is available at Revealnews.org