And we took the issue to them, and everyone was concerned about this issue or had some connection to it, and it was the genesis of the initiative. And we said, we wonder if this is an issue that our peer institutions in the greater Washington area are dealing with, too. And so I reached out to Darryll Pines - he and I are close personal friends - and we began to talk about it. Unbeknownst to me, other institutions in the region were going through some of the same issues. What you may also know, and what we don't talk about as much - and we had had on our campus a few students this past year, you know, commit death by gunshot on themselves. More than a hundred and twenty people every day have been dying from gun violence. How did this come about? Was there a particular eureka moment or something that inspired you? MARTIN: So, President Washington, I'm going to start with you because, as I understand the genesis of this, this came up with you and the president of the University of Maryland, Darryll Pines. Welcome back to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED to you, as well, President McGuire. MARTIN: Also with me is Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, located in Washington, D.C. That's in Northern Virginia, just outside of Washington, D.C. Joining us to tell us more are two of the members, Gregory Washington, the president of George Mason University. It's called the 120 Initiative, in honor of the 120 people who die, on average, from gun violence every day in the United States. More than a dozen local universities agreed to participate in the hope that pooling their combined resources, such as research capability and faculty expertise across disciplines, will allow them to find practical, fact-based approaches to address this problem. Many Americans feel a sense of despair about this, feeling that nothing can or will be done to address this public health disaster, but a group of university leaders in the Washington, D.C., metro area is trying to challenge that thinking with a powerful experiment - pooling their resources in a new consortium to address gun violence. And all this comes on the heels of two years that have seen the sharpest rise in gun violence in decades. That's according to the Gun Violence Archive, an online database that tracks gun violence. There have been at least 422 mass shooting events, meaning at least four people were shot in one event. So far this year, there have been more than 28,000 gun-related deaths in the United States.
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