For years, journalists have treated American gun violence as an hopeless problem. They cover the latest mass shooting, they write about congressional inaction, and then they move on.
We’re not doing that.
Early this year, the Guardian hired me as one of the country’s only full-time gun politics reporters. My job was to help us begin to understand why the gun debate is so broken – and what it would actually take to fix it.
America’s gun violence problem is so much bigger than mass shootings. And the liberal orthodoxies about what might work to prevent gun deaths aren’t always correct.
Our reporting this year on guns has been fiercely independent. We’re holding both Democrats and Republicans accountable for what they’re doing to prevent gun violence and suicide.
Last month, we published the exclusive results of the most definitive survey of gun ownership in two decades. The central finding – that only 3% of American adults own half the country’s guns – is already reshaping the assumptions of the gun debate.
This kind of reporting requires investment. When the data sets we need to answer crucial questions don’t exist, we build them. That’s what we did with The Counted, our in-depth database of police killings. That’s what we’re now doing with gun murders in America.
We’ve already learned that there are powerful voices for gun violence prevention that simply aren’t getting heard, and solutions that are getting lost in the swift cycles of tragedy, outrage and backlash.
Help us keep our focus on how to fix this problem. Support Guardian US by making a contribution or becoming a member.
Thank you,
Lois Beckett
