Wednesday will mark the 10th anniversary of The Trace. We had planned to launch a few days later, but a hate-fueled mass shooting at a historically Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, left nine people dead and roiled the country. At 5:33 a.m. on June 18, 2025, we hit publish on the first of 14 articles we ran that day. 

So began our first week of being the only newsroom in America to solely focus on gun violence. 

Since then we have decreased our cadence in order to increase our impact. And we’ve published more than 2,000 stories. We have partnered with over 300 newsrooms including The New Yorker, CBS, The Washington Post, Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, NBC, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and The Chicago Sun-Times. Nearly 44 million readers have read our work. 

We’ve grown from two people in a shared workspace to a 29-person team that is distributed across the country. 

Our reporting has been cited in books, court cases, academic journals, and scientific research; spurred calls for new legislation; and led to investigations and civil prosecutions. We’ve been the first to report on critical developments on our beat, including the surge in gun violence that came with the pandemic, the rise of ghost guns, increases in youth suicide, and the unintended consequences of lockdown drills in schools. We have also published deep feature stories that capture poorly understood aspects of gun culture, the suicide crisis, the root causes of shootings, and the lasting trauma inflicted on survivors and first responders. And we’ve always kept an eye trained on solutions, best exemplified by our newsletter The Trajectory, which we launched in 2023. 

We’ve won dozens of journalism awards, including the Edward R. Murrow Award, the RFK Book and Journalism Award, the Online Journalism Award, and the Deadline Club Award. Several of our journalists were named Livingston Finalists and, just this year, we were a finalist for a Peabody Award and a regional Emmy.

Then there are the less cheerful statistics.

When we launched The Trace, 86 people died every day from gunshot wounds in the United States. Today it’s 128 people, according to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

On average, more than 40,000 Americans die by gun violence every year.

To mark this milestone —  a decade of covering this preventable  public health crisis — we have rounded up some of The Trace stories that have had the greatest impact.  

Secrecy, Self-Dealing, and Greed at the NRA, by Mike Spies (2019)

In a groundbreaking investigation Mike Spies revealed that National Rifle Association executives, contractors, and vendors were extracting hundreds of millions of dollars from the nonprofit’s budget through gratuitous payments, sweetheart deals, and opaque financial arrangements. The blockbuster findings, co-published with The New Yorker, formed the basis of the civil prosecution of the group by New York State Attorney General Letitia James. Spies followed up with a series of stories nailing down different aspects of the NRA’s financial corruption. The James case ultimately ended the career of longtime leader Wayne LaPierre, and a jury found him and other executives liable for corruption and ordered them to pay more than $6 million. 

Since Parkland (2019)

In the weeks after a gunman killed 17 people and wounded 17 others  at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, The Trace’s former managing editor, Akoto Ofori-Atta, was searching for a meaningful way to memorialize the students who’d lost their lives. She started to wonder about all the children who die in shootings every day, most of whom don’t make national news. She proposed that we memorialize them  — and enlist their peers to do it. Ofori-Atta assembled a team of 200 teen reporters who wrote eulogies for the children and teens who’d been killed in the 365 days after Parkland — all 1,200 of them. Produced in partnership with the Miami Herald and McClatchy, the project reached millions of readers and increased public awareness of the fact that American kids are more likely to fall victim to gun violence outside of school. 

One of America’s Favorite Handguns Is Allegedly Firing On Its Owners, by Champe Barton and Tom Jackman (2023)

SIG Sauer’s P320 pistol has wounded more than 80 people who say they didn’t pull the trigger — and no U.S. agency has the power to intervene, Champe Barton and Tom Jackman reported in this blockbuster investigation with The Washington Post. In the wake of our reporting, members of Congress called for the Consumer Product Safety Commission to be given the power to oversee firearms; police in East Lyme, Connecticut, and Denver stopped their officers from carrying the P320; and our story was cited as evidence in an expansive motion for class certification in a class action lawsuit against SIG. In May, to follow up on our reporting, Trace staffer Ava Sasani worked with Barton to survey police departments and discovered many are reselling their SIG Sauer P320 pistols to the public.

An Atlas of American Gun Violence, by Daniel Nass

Our former data editor plugged five years of Gun Violence Archive data into a visual map that allows readers to enter an address anywhere in the U.S. and see how many shootings have occurred nearby. Subsequent updates, still made by Nass, allow readers to visualize 11 years of shootings. The result: You can see the gun violence happening all around us. The Atlas is one of the most visited features on our web site. 

Missing Pieces, by Brian Freskos (2017)

After reporting a series on stolen guns  Brian Freskos took a closer look at how American gun owners, preoccupied with self-defense, are inadvertently arming criminals they fear by leaving their firearms vulnerable to theft. To make this ambitious project possible, former Trace senior editor  Miles Kohrman forged a partnership with more than a dozen NBC TV stations around the country. Freskos and other reporters from The Trace and NBC TV then worked together to collect data on stolen guns from more than 1,000 law enforcement agencies in 36 states. The data showed that hundreds of thousands of firearms stolen from the homes and vehicles of legal owners were flowing each year into underground markets. The project prompted several major police departments to warn residents of the public safety risk posed by lax gun storage, and local media in cities with high rates of gun violence to publish warnings about the dangers of unsecured weapons.

Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust (2024)

This six-part podcast, produced by Long Lead and Campside Media, explores how the United States became so divided over guns. Host Garrett Graff begins at Columbine High School, then goes all the way back to the writing of the Second Amendment, following the trail of guns from the country’s founding to the present day, and all along featuring insights from Trace senior news writer Jennifer Mascia, who provided the research that served as the foundation of the series. The project was aired on public media across dozens of stations and has become part of Harvard Law School’s curriculum on the Second Amendment. 

Roots and Realities, by Mensah M. Dean (2024)

Centuries of discrimination against African Americans has contributed to what feels like a never-ending cycle of gun violence in Philadelphia. This series, published with The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Sunday Sun, Grid magazine, and The Philadelphia Citizen, explores the inequitable social policies that have kept the homicide rate for Black people in Philadelphia disproportionately high through the lens of residents who have lost grandfathers, brothers, cousins, and children to gunfire. The stories received local and national attention, with Dean appearing on the Apple News Today podcast and a segment on WURD Radio.

Easy Targets, by Brian Freskos (2019)

In a two-year investigation, published in partnership with The New Yorker, we laid out in unprecedented detail how gun stores with lax security fuel the gun trafficking that puts weapons on city streets. The multimedia project generated immediate impact: Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois reintroduced legislation to mandate security measures for gun stores, and U.S. Representative Joe Morelle of New York introduced a bill mandating security systems and more frequent compliance inspections. 

The Return of the Machine Gun, by Alain Stephens and Keegan Hamilton (2022)

An auto sear is a small plastic device that can be purchased on the black market for $20. When affixed to the back of a handgun, it transforms the weapon, allowing it to empty an entire magazine with a single pull of the trigger. This investigation with VICE News documented the exploding popularity of the auto sear among criminals and anti-government extremists. Two weeks after the story published, 41 Democratic members of Congress called on the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to issue updated and explicit guidance on auto sears, and Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota cited our story in a press release announcing the introduction of the Preventing Illegal Weapons Trafficking Act. The scoop earned Stevens a spot as an Online Journalism Award finalist.

The Bruen Era, by Chip Brownlee (2024)

In New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court issued the most significant gun rights decision in a generation, prompting a reconsideration of foundational gun laws. Our series, which includes a database of cases, tracks Bruen’s sweeping legal ramifications, case by case. There have been more than 1,600 challenges to gun laws since the landmark 2022 ruling. More than 1,000 were brought by people with felony convictions who have used Bruen to challenge their gun possession bans. “The goal of my series was to shine a light on all the effects of the Supreme Court’s decision in the real world,” said Brownlee, including judges striking down machine gun bans and minimum age limits for guns. Brownlee was named a Livingston Award finalist for his work on the series, and the data he gathered has been used by law schools and legal experts to shed a broader light on Bruen’s aftereffects.

This Tiny Louisiana Police Force Is a National Leader in Taking Guns From Abusers, by Ann Givens (2020)

Valerie Martinez-Jordan, a sheriff’s lieutenant and domestic violence survivor, spearheaded an aggressive effort to get guns out of the hands of abusers. One of the most remarkable aspects of her success: She did it in a deep red state with a strong gun culture. After the piece was published with The Daily Beast, her department was inundated with calls, emails, and letters, and she found herself on the “Today” show. “The story started an avalanche,” Martinez-Jordan said. Five years later, she’s still at it, and her decade-long effort has become a blueprint for other law enforcement agencies throughout Louisiana.

The ATF Catches Thousands of Lawbreaking Gun Dealers Every Year. It Shuts Down Very Few, by Brian Freskos, Daniel Nass, Alain Stephens, and Nick Penzenstadler (2021)

In partnership with USA TODAY, we pored over nearly 2,000 inspections of federally licensed gun dealers conducted between 2015 and 2017. The records — which were shared in a database that accompanied the final story — showed that the ATF was largely toothless and conciliatory, regularly going easy on wayward dealers and sometimes allowing guns to flow into the hands of criminals. In the months after our report, the Biden administration directed the agency to begin shuttering gun dealers that willfully committed certain violations, and congressional Democrats introduced a bill to give the it more leeway and inspection resources. (President Trump has since reversed those directives, ending Biden’s zero-tolerance policy for lawbreaking gun dealers.)

The Lost Children of North Minneapolis, by Selin Thomas (2024)

K.G. Wilson, a one-man violence prevention operation, refused to let young victims of gun violence be forgotten. Then his 6-year-old granddaughter was killed, and his faith in his mission was tested. When he returned to activism, he knew what it was like to be on the other side. The story published in partnership with Sahan Journal, was widely read and cited, helping to spread understanding of a longterm-but-undercovered pattern in certain communities across the country.  A city spokesperson wrote to Thomas to say: “The story spans years of the trauma and triumphs of North Minneapolis residents. You treated each soul with care and provided context of different levels.”  

Shot by a Civilian Wielding a Police Gun, by Chris Hacker, Champe Barton, Alain Stephens, Stephen Stock, Amy Corral, and Nicole Vap (2024)

We found that more than 52,000 police guns have been involved in crimes since 2006. Many of those weapons were resold by law enforcement agencies sworn to protect the public. After our investigation, produced in partnership with Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and CBS News and Stations, the ATF urged local law enforcement agencies to stop reselling used guns, and more than a dozen have since stopped reselling their used guns or pledged to reconsider the practice. The San Diego City Council also passed a law prohibiting police from selling their guns to gun dealers with inspection violations. 

The Gun Violence Data Hub (2024)

It’s difficult to find gun violence data, and the information that does exist is often incomplete and unreliable. To combat that, we have built  a centralized repository for data sets and a process through which journalists can request other data for their reporting, as well as a best practices guide. We’ve collaborated with NBC4 in Washington, D.C. and Verite, a digital news outlet in New Orleans, providing both newsrooms with the information they need to tell their stories. We’ve answered 44 help desk tickets and enabled folks to download over 300 data sets.