Everytown Announces Six Grantees Chosen to Advance Gun Violence Prevention Research Using AI-Powered “EveryShot” Database

NEW YORK – Everytown for Gun Safety Support Fund today announced six awardees for its inaugural  grant program inviting scholars in the gun violence prevention research field to leverage EveryShot, a first-of-its-kind, near real-time AI tool that tracks gun violence incidents across the United States. 

EveryShot contains over 80 variables of data on gun violence incidents, victims, and shooters, sourced from approximately 300,000 news articles. These articles are rich data sources that contain additional context surrounding each incident in the EveryShot database and could help answer critical research questions that structured data alone cannot address. 

“With cuts to federal funding severely impacting data collection efforts across the nation, EveryShot is helping to fill a critical gap in public health data availability for the gun violence research field,” said Sonali Rajan, Senior Director of Research at Everytown for Gun Safety. “We are excited to work with these researchers to explore the development and uptake of new and needed evidence-informed solutions to this devastating crisis.”

The Everytown research team is pleased to announce the recipients of three $20,000 grants exploring the following key tracks:

• Structural Vulnerability and Media Coverage of Youth Firearm Violence in the United States: Dr. Ayesha Dholakia at Boston’s Children Hospital will lead a study utilizing EveryShot to evaluate whether structural neighborhood vulnerability across the U.S. systematically shapes the intensity, depth, and narrative framing of media coverage regarding youth firearm violence.
• Validating EveryShot with New Orleans Data on Firearm Assaults: Dr. Julia Fleckman at Washington University in St. Louis will cross-reference EveryShot’s near-real-time data with a hyper-localized, multi-agency dataset of police, medical, and coroner records in New Orleans to validate the database for future public health research. 
• Building a Validation Framework for Media-Derived Firearm Incident Surveillance: Dr. Peter S. Larson at the University of Michigan will create a reproducible validation framework to see how EveryShot aligns with traditional public health data, comparing it against established federal surveillance systems (like the CDC) to strengthen the reliability of near-real-time data to support timely national policy responses.

The team has awarded an additional three seed grants for $5,000 each to the following projects: 

• Tracking and Framing Intimate Firearm-Related Partner Violence: Dr. Millan AbiNader and Ms. Rebecca Del Rossi at the University of Pennsylvania will validate EveryShot’s ability to track firearm-related intimate partner violence (IPV) by comparing it against national crime and death databases, while also analyzing media text to uncover how news reporting frames the responsibility for these incidents.
• Evaluating Data Equity and Police Concordance in St. Louis: Dr. Lee Slocum at the University of Missouri – St. Louis will evaluate EveryShot’s validity and analytic utility by linking it to St. Louis police records, examining whether incident characteristics and neighborhood context affects data visibility, and using large language models to analyze how media narratives amplify specific forms of gun violence and attribute responsibility for these events.
• Quantifying and Correcting News-Desert Bias for Equitable Insights: Dr. Richard Andrew Taylor at the University of Virginia will develop a national “Gun Violence Visibility Index” to account for areas with limited local journalism capacity, ensuring that EveryShot data can be accurately adjusted and contextualized for effective policy evaluation and resource targeting.