The following excerpt was sent out from Mother Jones:
More than a decade after Mother Jones created the country’s first database tracking mass shootings, the 47-year-old nonprofit news organization was recently awarded $350,000 in grants to deepen Mother Jones’ gun violence prevention reporting in California and across the nation.
“Gun violence is an omnipresent part of daily life in America, yet the causes and impact are still poorly understood—in large part because the gun lobby has been able to stop the federal government from doing essential research on this issue,” said Mother Jones CEO Monika Bauerlein. “Our goal has been to fill that void, and the generous support of the California Wellness Foundation and Fund for a Safer Future will allow us to shine a light on the groundbreaking work that some communities are doing to prevent these tragedies.”
The California Wellness Foundation, which is one of California’s largest public health philanthropies, contributed $300,000 to Mother Jones, and the Fund for a Safer Future, the nation’s only donor collaborative exclusively focused on reducing gun violence in America, donated $50,000.
Mother Jones launched its nationwide database of mass shootings after an attack at a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, on July 20, 2012, left 12 people dead and 70 wounded. In the years since, the database has grown to document 146 mass shootings, has been viewed more than 5.2 million times, and has been cited by other news outlets more than 2,000 times. It records key information about each of these events (such as the perpetrator’s age, gender, race, history of mental health issues, type of weapon used, and much more) and is widely used by researchers, policymakers, law enforcement officials, and mental health specialists.
