How The Trace Localizes Gun Violence Data

The Gun Violence Data Hub’s core mission includes being a resource to local newsrooms. We’re especially interested in under-resourced coverage areas and places with particularly high rates of gun violence.

We’re taking action with the launch of our help desk and resources page, and in Spring 2025 we’ll officially launch our data library.

But The Trace has been localizing gun violence data well before the Hub’s inception. Our reporting on topics including road rage gun violence, school-adjacent shootings, small towns and rural areas, and our Atlas of American Gun Violence have all been repurposed or cited by local newsrooms throughout the country to shed light on this public health crisis endemic to the U.S.

The atlas enables an overview of fatal and nonfatal shootings, visually demonstrating the relative infrequency of mass shootings despite their outsized impact on the zeitgeist. It lets local reporters familiar with their surrounding geography immediately see which neighborhoods are most impacted. In the view from Rochester, New York, below, the empty bubble to the south that surrounds University of Rochester is evident to anyone familiar with the city.

In March, The Trace published a story with a headline that challenged common wisdom: “You’re More Likely to Be Shot in Selma Than in Chicago”. Several local newsrooms cited our story in their own reporting, including MinnPost, Dallas Weekly, and Chicago Public Square.

The story explored the prevalence and growth of gun violence in America’s smaller towns and rural areas over the last 10 years — a period that ended with a decline in firearm casualties in our largest cities, but a sustained increase in less-populated areas.

Reporters found cities of fewer than 250,000 people in the South collectively experiencing a perilous upward gun violence trend, while overall their counterparts in the West, Midwest and Northeast saw much more modest increases.

Later this fall, the NBC News4 investigative team in Washington, D.C., will use our data on school-adjacent shootings to examine the impact on students and racial disparities among those affected. In our national story, Trace reporters identified the district as a place with a stark racial divide when it came to gun violence near public K-12 schools.

Our road rage coverage has been cited by 48 TV and radio stations, newspapers, and digital newsrooms spanning 24 states. The Trace’s national analysis identified Houston as the city with the highest number of road rage shootings, and five newsrooms there — Fox Houston, Axios Houston, KHOU, Houston Public Media, and the Houston Chronicle — cited our story in their coverage of the issue.

This spring, when we launch our data library, reporters and the public will have easy access to cleaned and localized data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The CDC’s WONDER database is a rich resource of vital statistics for the country, including coroner reported gun deaths from every state. But the website is clunky, requiring individual exports based on queries from a platform that has more buttons and knobs than a recording studio soundboard.

ATF, meanwhile, helpfully separates its gun trace statistics by U.S. states and territories. But in some cases it’s useful to recombine those different tables. And currently they’re only available as HTML elements or formatted Excel files — neither of which are particularly useful for data analysis.

This is all just the start. The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub aims to become the most comprehensive data resource on the subject in the US; and we can’t do it without you. We want to know what you want to know. Please reach out to us via our help desk or at [email protected] with any questions, ideas, feedback or criticism.

We’re ready to help!