The programs, policies, and people driving positive change in America’s gun violence problem.
Looking back at the stories we told, and which stuck with us, during an eventful year.
The role of the gun industry in America’s gun violence epidemic.
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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Domestic Violence
Following The Trace’s reporting, Attorney General William Barr created a working group of U.S. Attorneys to share best practices for charging abusers who keep their guns.
When easy access to guns mixes with violent misogyny.
How We Fix This
As U.S. attorneys prosecute more gun crimes, they are catching domestic abusers in their net.
President Donald Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Violence Against Women believes that arming women in domestic violence situations is key to their safety, despite experts’ warnings that the introduction of guns into abusive relationships can imperil victims.
Philadelphia
We must recognize that abusers with guns can cause damage well before they fire.
Ask The Trace
A reader asks whether strict gun laws reduce killings by intimate partners. Experts say yes, but some laws are more effective than others.
In coercive control, men use guns to threaten, manipulate, and traumatize their intimate partners, without ever pulling a trigger.
One million American women have survived a gunshot wound or been shot at, according to a 2016 review. But a gun doesn’t have to go off to cause harm in an abusive relationship. The same study estimated that 4.5 million…
A new study from the University of Pennsylvania finds that more than three quarters of domestic violence incidents involved dating partners, rather than spouses, a statistic that has potentially significant implications for protecting domestic abuse victims from gun violence.
Politicians and law enforcement officials across the country are beginning to experiment with new approaches to reducing domestic violence and gun deaths by forcing abusers who aren’t allowed to own guns to actually surrender weapons still in their possession. Under…
Women in America are shot to death by their current or former romantic partners with alarming regularity — once every 16 hours, as my colleague Jennifer Mascia has written. New research published today in the American Journal of Epidemiology offers…
One line of text in a document released after Sunday’s mass shooting in Texas should have stopped Devin Kelley from buying the guns he is thought to have used in the massacre. A crystal-clear warning on a now infamous,…
Background Checks
A year before committing Sunday’s mass shooting in a tight-knit church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, suspect Devin Kelley walked into a sporting goods store to buy a Ruger assault style rifle he should have been banned from owning because of…
Domestic abusers in Pennsylvania currently have 60 days to turn over their guns following a conviction. A bill pending in the state Legislature would narrow that window to 24 hours. The legislation would also refine the state’s gun-surrender…
“It’s a matter of life and death," says one survivor.
