Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund

The Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund seeks to improve America's understanding of the causes of gun violence and the means to reduce it.

Through original research and targeted grants, Everytown fills gaps in mainstream research and journalism, educates the public about evidence-based policies for reducing gun violence, and builds the intellectual foundation for our policy priorities.

Research: While the NRA continues to block federal funding for public health research on gun violence, our in-house staff conducts and publishes our own primary research and investigations.

Legal Expertise: Our in-house attorneys – the country's foremost specialists in gun law and policy – educate policymakers and journalists about America's patchwork of local, state, and federal gun laws. For example, Everytown's Gun Law Navigator (available at www.everytownresearch.org) is the largest historical database of modern U.S. gun laws. It allows researchers, reporters, and advocates to compare the strength of state gun laws and track trends over time, dating back to 1991.

Digital Education: Through targeted emails, SMS texts, Facebook, and Twitter, we educate and engage Everytown's nearly four million online supporters.

Grassroots Training: Through intensive efforts we have built a dedicated, well-informed grassroots base, led by our Moms Demand Action volunteers and gun violence survivors. Overall we have more than 50,000 active grassroots volunteers, and we lead volunteer chapters in all 50 states.

Cultural Engagement: Gun safety is too complex to address only with laws – which is why we use cultural vehicles to engage more Americans on this issue. We lead the Wear Orange campaign for gun safety and awareness, modeled on pink for breast cancer. Our Creative Council (founded and chaired by Julianne Moore) and Authors Council bring together more than 275 artists and writers to help amplify the gun safety message and grow our movement.

Grants: Our grant recipients further help fill gaps in information. We are the seed donor to The Trace, a news website launched in 2015 to bolster media coverage of the culture, policy, and politics of guns. We also support select academic and think tank research, including studies of underground gun markets (at Harvard and Johns Hopkins) and the impact of gun violence on cities' economic health (Urban Institute).

Since Everytown launched in April 2014, we have published 20 original reports, on topics including illegal online gun sales, the nexus of guns and domestic violence, and strategies for reducing gun violence in American cities. Several of those reports helped educate policymakers and the public in states where we waged successful campaigns for gun safety ballot initiatives (Nevada and Washington State) and legislation (Oregon).

Also interesting is our creation of first-of-their-kind, custom databases for incidents that attract significant public attention but are not rigorously catalogued – unintentional child shootings and school shootings. No one, not even the federal government, tracks and logs these shootings like Everytown does. For us, counting those shootings is the first step toward doing something about them.

Our research reports and databases are available at www.EverytownResearch.org.