The Trace, a news organization that reports on gun violence, has a comprehensive library of 22 public data sets they have cleaned and assembled for use that are updated as new data is released. Its Data Hub has FAQs and resources for journalists who use the data, including a help desk where journalists can reach out with specific questions, request new data sets or submit inquiries about collaborations with The Trace.

There’s a section for details, limitations, methodology (how The Trace compiled the data), guidance for use and examples of stories produced with the data. There’s also filters for the data library for topic, geographies and data type. Some data sets have multiple tables available to download through a dropdown, which also come with descriptions about the number of rows and a sample for each.

How to use

After clicking on a data set, there are several dropdown menus to select before downloading. Most have options to filter by geographic location, or you can stick with the default of all data. There is also an option at the top to preview a sample or dictionary of the data, which has names of the columns and a description for each one.

After that, journalists just have to enter an email to download. The Trace asks that reporters cite them and hyperlink back to the Gun Violence Data Hub. There’s a template under the download button for news copy, news graphics and research.

Data sets available

Immigration

• Federal Immigration Agent shootings: aggregated data set of shootings by ICE, and Customs and Border Protection agents

Gun deaths

• Mass shootings: all shootings from 2014-2025 with at least four victims injured/killed
• Gun deaths: gun deaths by homicide, suicide and unintentional shootings with factors including age, ethnicity, race and gender dating to 1999
• Pregnancy gun deaths: gun deaths of people who were pregnant or within one year of being pregnant — deaths are expressed as both raw number and per 100,000 people
• Road rage shootings: annual tracking of firearm-involved road rage (last updated March 2025)
• Gun suicides by those 70+: county-level data for people 70 or older who died by suicide
• Gun violence trends: aggregated weekly killings and injured victim totals for many U.S. cities from 2014-2025
• Quarterly gun violence: total gun deaths and injuries by quarter and city

Youth

• Youth gun deaths: data since 1999 about those under 18
• School-adjacent shootings: every shooting within 500 yards of a K-12 school between 2015 and the present
• K-12 students with guns on campus: presence of firearms and armed security in public and charter K-12 schools (last updated December 2025)
• Youth leading cause of death: data shows the leading cause of death by year — gun violence has remained the leading cause for young people in the U.S. since 2019 (last updated November 2025)

Gun sales and movement

• Firearm sales: estimated national and state gun sales since 2000
• Federal Firearm Licensees: data on those granted licenses for dealing, manufacturing or importing firearms or ammunition
• TSA firearm detections: number of guns detected at airports by TSA each year by state and municipality (last updated September 2025)
• Gun dealer thefts and losses: guns stolen from dealers and firearms that went missing or were lost (last updated August 2025)
• Domestic gun traces: ATF data shows a summary of how many crime guns were recovered and traced in each state, the states in which those guns were first purchased, the types/calibers and time-to-crime rates — this data is useful for analyzing gun trafficking trends (last updated February 2025)
• International gun traces: ATF gun traces from Mexico and Canada
• California crime guns: data showing how many crime guns were traced to individual retailers and how many of the firearms traced were manufactured by a given company
• California ghost guns: data on ghost guns, unserialized guns and serialized guns recovered by law enforcement in the state (last updated July 2025)
• Firearm production: how many firearms have been produced for the U.S. market since 1899 (last updated February 2025)

Court decisions

• Bruen decisions: Second Amendment/firearm court decisions that cite the 2022 Supreme Court Bruen decision, which expanded gun rights, or its descendants

Acronyms and terms

• ATF: Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the federal law enforcement agency within the U.S. Department of Justice that regulates and investigates and prevents violent crimes involving illegal firearms
• Ghost guns: an untraceable firearm assembled by kits or 3D-printed parts, allowing buyers to evade federal background checks — The Trace’s work about ghost guns
• Gun traces: the movement of a firearm from manufacturer or importer, through the distribution chain and to retail purchaser
• GVA: Gun Violence Archive
• Parquet: a data type and option in the dropdown menu — it organizes data by columns to allow for more efficient compression and is designed for big data storage and retrieval
• TSA: Transportation Security Administration