Every day, it seems, President Donald Trump makes a move that threatens to destabilize the way that government and policy have functioned in the United States for decades. It’s clear our country is changing. The Trace’s beat, gun violence, is changing too.
Our team is tracking every relevant executive order, court decision, and funding directive and working to make sense of them for our readers. So far, Trump has issued orders to repeal gun regulations and curtail policing of bad firearms dealers, scrapped the Biden-era White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention, and cut funding to services that seek to bolster people who have been harmed by shootings. That last action alone has potentially enormous implications for firearms violence.
But we are spending at least as much time, in our planning meetings and internal discussions, thinking about how The Trace will meet this moment in a less reactive way. Gun violence remains an uncontained and devastating crisis in our country. We know that things are changing quickly, and that we need to be nimble and creative. We also need to refrain from turning too much of our time and attention to Trump-induced chaos.
In order to serve our readers and our mission, we will continue to prioritize the deep investigative work and careful explanatory journalism that other newsrooms are unlikely to do. We are also trying, in the immortal words of Mister Rogers, to “Look for the helpers.” On our beat, that means paying attention to the people who are finding creative ways to reduce shootings, even in the face of powerful crosscurrents. We are making a concerted effort to identify what works, on the state and local levels, and to spread that knowledge. This includes exploring the causes of the dramatic correction in gun violence rates that followed a pandemic-era surge. But that correction has not been even. In the past few weeks, our Philadelphia reporter, Mensah M. Dean, has shown that more young people in Philly seem to be pulling the trigger. And our new Great Lakes correspondent, Josiah Bates, has found that, in Cleveland, children and teens are actually at higher risk of being shot. If we have a more complete and accurate sense of what is happening in the communities most devastated by gun violence, we will have a better chance of addressing it.
On the investigative front, we will continue to watch the firearms industry, which is experiencing a lull in sales and also a loosening of oversight and regulation. Champe Barton — who has become one of the most knowledgeable reporters on the gun industry over the past few years — is on the case. He’s balancing newsy scoops with a long-term project that will publish this summer.
Our senior staff writer, Mike Spies, is looking at the intersection of the gun industry and political violence. In part, that’s a response to changes that predated the new administration. Ever since Mike’s groundbreaking reporting on the National Rifle Association’s financial misdeeds, that organization has faltered and faded; Trump declined an invitation to speak at its annual conference last week.
In the middle of 2024, we had several conversations at The Trace about how it was time to replace the “gun lobby” frame we have long used in our coverage and our thinking. The goals of the NRA had largely been absorbed by the Republican Party, making lobbying somewhat superfluous. The NRA is still an organization to watch, but it’s no longer a dominant force, and it’s largely been replaced by a looser, more amorphous collection of gun rights groups. And all of them are undergirded by a right-wing identity politics that revolves around firearms ownership and carrying. We have found threads worth pulling and are now working on the first stories to emerge from this reorientation.
Last year, we published powerful work on gun laws and the legal system, and we are keeping our eyes trained on the courts. Just this month, Chip Brownlee made sense of the Supreme Court’s surprising decision not to hear a case on age restrictions, and Will Van Sant reported on evidence that the White House’s attacks on law firms will hinder pro bono work on gun issues. Both reporters are eager to hear from sources with tips or ideas.
One broad strategy of the Trump administration is the dismantling of reliable systems of information and expertise. A few years ago, when we drew up plans for our Gun Violence Data Hub, we did not expect that data preservation would be a significant part of its mission — but here we are. We are downloading or scraping data from government and nongovernmental organizations, preserving those bytes on our own machines and servers, and talking frequently to people who have made lifetime careers of studying the issue. (If you have tips for us, please reach out to hub editor George LeVines, or to Chip, who covers federal policy.)
We know that attention spans are strained right now, so as the year progresses, we pledge to find the most germane news, and to focus tightly on impact. We will hold ourselves to the highest storytelling standards and also resist the urge to play to fear when the threats may not be as grave as they first appear. Many times in the past few months, after Trump has said that he intends to do something drastic, he has been constrained by limits on executive power, our court system, and even public opinion. When we see that a development may be getting overhyped, we will tell you so.
Gun violence hasn’t been on most front pages in the past couple weeks, save for brief coverage of mass shootings at a Dallas school and at Florida State University. But we must remember that guns kill thousands of people in the United States every year, exacting a profound toll of fear and trauma, continuing cycles of violence in marginalized communities, and costing hundreds of millions of dollars. Shootings afflict our country at a rate and scale unknown in the rest of the developed world, and which most Americans agree is unconscionable. Since 2020, guns have been the primary cause of death for children and teenagers, exacting a heavy burden on our young people that will shadow them for the rest of their lives. As long as that’s the case, we have a profound problem in America.
