Approximately 190 miles separate the campuses of Washington State University Vancouver and Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Ore. But that distance seemed to disappear when 10 people were gunned down in a mass shooting at Umpqua Community College on Oct. 1, 2015.
“It’s not safe to be anywhere,” John Barber realized. “What if a similar thing happened here?”
Barber, a digital-media artist who teaches in the Creative Media and Digital Culture Department at WSUV, wanted to find some meaningful way to memorialize the victims of that tragedy — and all the victims of intentional, homicidal gun violence in America.
“It seemed that 2015 was a year of really pronounced mass gun killings — in schools, in places of worship,” he said. “The question became, how might I do something to memorialize these people whose lives were taken by senseless gun violence?”
First, Barber went hunting for complete, reliable statistics about gun homicides in America. He was surprised to discover that assembling the data wasn’t easy. Even the FBI, which is supposed to collect and report homicides, doesn’t have definitive information. Eventually, Barber looked to an independent, nonpolitical website called GunViolenceArchive.org — plus his own monitoring of news reports of shootings.