The role of the gun industry in America’s gun violence epidemic.
Our team is examining a decade's worth of data from the Gun Violence Archive for insights into one of the most devastating public health crises in the United States.
The National Rifle Association is one of the most powerful special interest groups in America. We’re investigating how it spends its money.
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How We Fix This
The gun background check system is only as good as the records it contains. How one affable bureaucrat helped Louisiana set the standard for flagging people banned from owning firearms.
Gun Safety
Children living in poor areas are almost twice as likely to die by firearm suicide as those who reside in wealthier neighborhoods, according to a study published today in JAMA Pediatrics. The paper seeks to unpack an alarming rise…
Years ago, most detectives stopped trying to retrieve fingerprints from shell casings. A new method, touted as 25 times better, could change that.
Longform
Las Vegas's death investigators witnessed the atrocities of the Route 91 shooting, then had to grapple with the difficult task of healing themselves.
Mass Shooting
Katherine Schweit thinks people don’t realize how much power they have to prevent mass shootings.
Criminal Justice
Ideological lines get tangled when reforming the system means people once barred from owning firearms can get them back.
The city that set the bar for sharing ballistic intel is pushing its successful approach regionwide.
Criminologists thought it was impossible to get DNA off of shell casings, but a technique pioneered in the Netherlands is having notable results.
Chicago
We talked to author Alex Kotlowitz about what’s changed, and what hasn’t, in his city over the past 30 years.
ATF
A push by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to improve gun crime investigations has been hindered by local police departments that fail to trace guns or to promptly enter shell casings into a national ballistics…
Law Enforcement
We set out to determine how domestic killers in South Carolina got their guns. Instead, we found evidence of a widespread breakdown of critical crime-fighting intel.
A national database of shell casings has been deployed unevenly. So the DOJ is encouraging lawyers who want to use it to link and crack cases.
New Jersey and Delaware have laws mandating that investigators use an innovative ballistics system called NIBIN. The other 48 states don’t — and their reticence makes it harder to ID shooters everywhere.
When I first learned that investigators can look at tiny marks on shell casings from bullets to get leads on gun crimes that plague neighborhoods across the country, I had to see for myself. Read Next…
Propelled by a new, no-nonsense boss, Contra Costa County ditched the excuses that keep many law enforcement agencies from taking better advantage of a crime-fighting database called NIBIN.
Background Checks
The bureau is getting ready to tap National Data Exchange and its 400 million records to help screen gun buyers. Experts say it would have blocked the Charleston church shooter from obtaining his murder weapon.
