The Coalition for Gun Control was founded in the wake of the Montreal Massacre in 1989 to support strategies to reduce gun death, injury and crime, and to 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 shooting deaths 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, those headlines 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 distant. Unless an incident happens close to home, it’s removed from real life. But that response is false comfort, because the truth is that all of us have been too close to gun violence.

These consequences generated the core insight: for anyone who lives in Toronto, gun violence is a lot closer than you realize.

Dodgethebullet.ca transforms public-domain data into a compelling and highly personalized user experience that vividly demonstrates just how close Torontonians are to major gun violence. To make the issue of gun violence leap from the theoretical to the personal, the agency 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, the record of all reported crimes in the city, used almost exclusively by law enforcement, the media and policy-makers. The app instantly calculates the distance to the nearest incident of gun violence. The user then sees a message that reads, for example, “You dodged a bullet by 152 metres.” That result turns dry statistics into powerful information. 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.

Dodgethebullet.ca makes an issue that seems distant feel much, much closer to home. By combining publicly available data with mapping technology, the team was able to contextualize gun violence in a way that breaks through complacency. Even though the website only recently launched, 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.”