Fourteen women were murdered in 1989 in a mass shooting known as the Montreal Massacre. The Coalition for Gun Control was founded in the wake of that tragedy 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 over the last several 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.

The Coalition is relentless in its efforts to battle gun violence and advocate for gun reform. Our goal with this campaign was to fight one of the major barriers to reform, public complacency, and spur action on this important issue.

We created dodgethebullet.ca to transform public-domain data into a compelling and highly personalized user experience that vividly demonstrates just how close Torontonians are to major gun violence.

The project is a web and mobile app that utilizes Location Services data to pinpoint the user’s precise location. Then it shows how close the nearest incident of gun violence was, along with the message “You dodged a bullet by ___ metres.”

We wanted to find a way to connect directly with the citizens of a city experiencing a surge in gun deaths. While the rise in gun violence had resulted in widespread media coverage, we realized there were unintended consequences of constant exposure to headlines about shootings.

First, constant exposure starts 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, people are able to compartmentalize it, separate it from their own lives, and develop a false sense of comfort.

Our insight: Every single person living in Toronto has been closer to gun violence than they realize.

The web app prompts users to share their location. That search query then accesses data from the Public Safety Data Portal and instantly calculates the distance to the nearest incident of gun violence.

The Toronto Police Public Safety Data Portal is the public record of all reported crimes in the city. The dodgethebullet.ca app accesses the information the database provides each time an individual performs a search, turning dry statistics into powerful information.

And if being provided with a specific number isn’t vivid enough, the site also visualizes the information with a satellite image of Toronto streets, zooming in to the user’s exact location.

Visitors to the site can share a satellite image of the city and its neighbourhoods on social, 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. In the first two weeks of the campaign, over 2,000 Torontonians used the tool to determine how close they were to a shooting.

The campaign was 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.”