In 2024, The Trace launched the Gun Violence Data Hub to help supply reliable data on gun violence to newsrooms, researchers and the public.
Last November, the nonprofit newsroom — which is dedicated to covering gun violence — celebrated the Data Hub’s one-year anniversary.
We checked in with Aaron Mendelson, a data journalist and the news developer for the Gun Violence Data Hub, to talk about how the project’s first year went and how journalists can use the resource to boost their reporting.
What is the Gun Violence Data Hub, how and does it work?
A dearth of data has been a longtime issue on this beat, and so [with this data hub] we are doing everything we can to counter that. We acquire, clean, and publish datasets, and work with journalists to use that data to go deeper in their reporting. We’re a team of four.
My job is to locate and share data, whether that’s using records requests to get information on ghost guns in California, securing researcher access to public health data, or setting up a pipeline to automatically update Gun Violence Archive figures on mass shootings.
The Trace celebrated the Hub’s one-year anniversary in November. How did the first year go?
Our collaborations have been the highlights. We worked with the NBC affiliate in D.C. to report on shootings outside schools; with Investigate West to explore how laws designed to disarm people accused of domestic abuse are falling short; and provided data [that] NYU researchers used to link ghost gun recoveries to increases in firearm deaths. We’ve learned a lot about what is and isn’t helpful for local journalists and we’re building on that in year two.
My big reporting project was on gun suicides among older Americans. For that story, I analyzed person-level death data, traveled to rural Colorado to do field reporting, and conducted over 25 interviews. It’s not often discussed, but Americans 70 and over have the highest suicide rates of any age group.
When I co-published my story with GQ in September, I didn’t quite anticipate the post-publication life that project would take on. We published the data from the analysis, and that has now led to collaborations with newsrooms in over a dozen states.
I’ve been really floored by the work those collaborators have done. The stories from Maine to Wyoming to California have been powerful and distinct from one another. And that’s as it should be — local reporters know their coverage areas best, and have tailored their stories accordingly.
What have you learned about gun violence data from working on the Hub?
Powerful groups have worked to limit the amount of data and research on guns and gun violence.
That may sound conspiratorial, but it’s true. I’m thinking about the Tiahrt Amendment, which bars the ATF from releasing vital information about crime gun tracing. Another measure from the 1990s, which was pushed by the NRA, effectively banned federally-funded research into gun violence. That changed in 2019, but it was on the books for so long that it’s meant we missed out on decades of academic work.
Recent cuts at the federal level are hindering the public’s ability to understand gun violence, too. As the director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center said in January, “It’s easy to lie with statistics, but it’s much easier to lie without statistics.”
How has the Data Hub benefited reporters at The Trace and other outlets?
We actually only launched the data library aspect of the project in March, so that’s still coming up on its first birthday.
But we estimate that we published 350-plus stories with collaborators and syndicators during that first year. So we’ve been pleased to see a level of interest in doing stories on gun violence grounded in data. We want to build a resource that journalists draw on for breaking news, for explainers, for investigative work, you name it.
One thing we’ve seen in early 2026 is that data collected by my Trace colleagues on shootings during ICE raids has informed the coverage of the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. That data has been cited in dozens of outlets, from the New York Times and Reuters to local TV news. It’s a good example of how data can help contextualize a high-profile incident, and help audiences see the bigger picture.
What are some of the goals you have for the Hub going forward?
It’s not glamorous, but I think one of our biggest tasks is to maintain the datasets we’ve already published. Many of them are updated yearly, monthly, or daily, and they lose value if we’re not keeping them current. I mentioned I’d set up a pipeline to automatically update our mass shootings dataset — which unfortunately grows all the time — but a lot of these are government files that are not in user-friendly formats. So there’s a lot of grunt work that goes into maintenance.
I want to continue using FOIA and state public record laws to liberate records and get them on the Gun Violence Data Hub. Often government agencies have data that is far more detailed than what’s publicly released, and so I’m always seeking that. We’re also open to creative ideas for datasets that go beyond spreadsheets. If someone wants to do a collaborative reporting project analyzing video, we have the ability to share that kind of media as well.
One thing that’s worked really well is sharing national data, which local journalists can then analyze in their coverage area. That was effective with my project on suicides among older Americans, and on our work on shootings near schools. So we definitely plan to do more of that.
How can health reporters benefit from this resource?
Journalists can submit questions to us, and we do our best to answer those. We’ll point you to good data answers whenever we can, even if it’s not data on our site.
And I’d encourage folks to check out our data library.There’s a lot of public health data there, including over a dozen tables of CDC data on gun deaths, data on youth gun deaths, data on gun deaths of pregnant people, and so on. Guns are such an American issue, and so it intersects with so many beats. But public health is at the top of the list.
