The effort, part of Baltimore’s more than $100 million gun violence prevention plan, relies on staffers like Fitzgerald to build trust with people at risk of such violence and offer them resources like housing or food. Researchers believe these programs reduce gun deaths.

Yet one morning in 2019, Fitzgerald said, his oldest son, Deshawn McCoy, then 26, was shot just outside of the neighborhood he patrolled at the time. Fitzgerald said McCoy was a “really beautiful soul,” who fixed dirt bikes at a local garage. McCoy became the city’s , one of 348 that year, among the city’s deadliest. He left behind three daughters.

“This is our zone,” said Fitzgerald, pointing toward McElderry Park. “My son got cooked over here.”

For years, violence intervention was the work of loosely organized, underfunded groups. Then gun violence spiked during the covid pandemic and the Biden administration and Congress poured in money to better integrate such programs within cities. It appeared to help: In Baltimore and beyond, gun violence has plummeted.

The number of homicides in the city dropped 41%, from more than 300 a year in 2021 to 201 in 2024, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland.

“Gun violence is a sticky, hard problem to solve,” said Daniel Webster, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions in Baltimore. “We’re getting it right finally.”

Now President Donald Trump’s administration has gutted funding for that work.

Webster said it could take years to untangle what led to the city’s gun violence drop. Among the factors, he said: the pandemic’s end, investments in violence intervention, improvements that have given police more legitimacy in neighborhoods, targeted prosecutions, and an aggressive effort to remove untraceable ghost guns.

“You need all of these systems working well to have systemic reductions in gun violence,” he said.

The Trump administration has slashed funding for and research, cutting about $500 million in grants to organizations that support public safety.

At the same time, Trump has loosened gun laws the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which oversees gun dealers. He has also sent federal troops into the Democratic-led cities of Chicago; Los Angeles; Memphis, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon; and Washington, D.C.

Webster said cities are still benefiting from pandemic-era efforts to address gun deaths. But given the Trump policy changes, if violence escalates, city leaders could have a hard time keeping it from spiraling out of control.

Trying Something Different

Safe Streets is among the promising violence prevention programs that could lose funding. Staffers in the city’s most violent neighborhoods operate like community health workers.

During the pandemic, the Biden administration provided billions of dollars to local governments through the American Rescue Plan Act. Biden urged them to deploy money to community violence intervention programs, which have been shown to by as much as 60%. His administration to spend Medicaid dollars on such programs. The goal: Stop gun deaths.

Few cities seized the opportunity.

Analyzing federal data, professors Philip Rocco of Marquette University and Amanda Kass of DePaul University found local governments used the ARPA money for 132,451 projects. Yet only 231, less than 0.2%, involved community violence intervention, they said.

In Baltimore, then-newly elected mayor Brandon Scott was ready for the federal influx.

Baltimore’s homicide rate had been high since 2015, when a 25-year-old Black man named Freddie Gray died in police custody. Protests erupted and fractures between residents and police deepened. Baltimore ended the year with 342 homicides, the first time since 1999 that more than 300 were recorded in the city.

“We got really good at our jobs” in the years after Gray’s death, said James Gannon, trauma program manager at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore.

Gun deaths tracked what public health researcher Lawrence T. Brown called the : racially segregated areas that fanned out across Baltimore’s eastern and western neighborhoods around a wealthy central strip. People who faced years of forced displacement and disinvestment , which fueled the cycle.

Every year from 2015 to 2022, the city recorded at least 300 homicides.

“We had to try something different,” said Stefanie Mavronis, director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. Scott created the agency weeks after he was sworn into office in 2020, later with $50 million in ARPA money and $20 million annually from the city’s budget.

Containing an Outbreak

The office’s budget — $22 million in fiscal year 2026 — is a fraction of the city’s .

Still, the money allowed Baltimore’s leaders to scale up a new approach: addressing gun violence the way public health officials might handle an infectious disease outbreak, Mavronis said.

City staffers identified the small subset of people most at risk of being shot or becoming the next shooter through crime data and referrals from social service workers, hospitals, and violence intervention staff, she said. Mavronis said that gangs, friends willing to engage in violence for each other, and retaliation had been driving gun deaths in the city.

“This never-ending cycle of violence and loss and trauma,” Mavronis said, “comes from that.”

The city convened hospital presidents to connect gunshot victims and their friends and family to counseling, crisis support, and city services.

It offered people help finding therapy, a job, or emergency relocation — and threatened arrest and prosecution if they retaliated.

“We decided that we were no longer going to subscribe to the belief that one thing, one agency, one part of government, one program was going to help cure Baltimore of this disease of gun violence that has had a stranglehold on this city for the entirety of my life,” Scott said.

The Coming Cliff

Baltimore is on pace this year to post its fewest gun deaths since Richard Nixon was president.

“Some of it is the national zeitgeist of the moment,” said Adam Rosenberg, executive director of Center for Hope at LifeBridge Health, which operates Safe Streets sites and the Violence Response Team at Sinai Hospital. He credits mainly the infusion of funding that allowed more resources and hands-on engagement with high-risk communities.

“We typically talk about how poverty affects homicides, but it works in reverse too,” Webster said. “People don’t invest in homes and businesses or, frankly, in people, where people get shot regularly.”

Fitzgerald, who grew up in East Baltimore, said he started working for Safe Streets in 2010 for the paycheck.

He’s been on both sides of gun violence, he said, as someone hit more than a dozen times in shootings — first when he was 12. At 13, Fitzgerald said, he shot a cousin in the leg. Over years, he was in and out of the criminal justice system, including for charges of attempted murder, which helped him understand the people he now works with every day, he said.

No college “can certify you in my experiences in violence,” he said. “That’s what allows me to identify and detect potentially violent situations.”

Today, Fitzgerald, 49, believes that teaching kids trauma coping mechanisms can drive culture change and stop shootings.

“Our kids see more death than soldiers,” he said.

But federal funding is drying up. Anthony Smith, executive director of , which supports local leaders on gun violence reduction, estimates that about 65 groups have lost funding this year. And Trump’s signature legislation slashes nearly $1 trillion in anticipated federal Medicaid spending over the next decade.

Center for Hope lost $1.2 million from federal cuts.

“It’s like a car racing along, and you see the cliff coming,” Rosenberg said. “I don’t know if the resources are there anymore, but the need certainly is.”

Rosenberg said that, because of their experiences, staffers such as Fitzgerald are “incredible messengers” for people involved in gun violence, and he noted that they are thoroughly vetted.

Fitzgerald put it this way: “I’m trying to save my kids, the community. The people we’re trying to save is our friends and our family, and ourselves.”

Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News senior correspondent Fred Clasen-Kelly contributed to this report.

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“When you get shot,” he said, “you stop thinking about the future.”

He is anchored by his wife and child and faith. He once wanted to work as a forklift driver but has built a stable career in information technology. He finds camaraderie with other gunshot survivors and in advocacy.

Still, trauma remains lodged in his daily life. As gun violence surged in the shadows of the covid pandemic, it shook Harris’ fragile sense of security. He moved his family out of Philadelphia to a leafy suburb in Delaware. But a nagging fear of crime persists.

Now he is thinking about buying a gun.

Harris is one of tens of thousands of Americans killed or injured each year by gun violence, a public health crisis that escalated in the pandemic and churns a into a hospital emergency room every half hour.

Over the past two decades, the firearm industry has and stepped up sales campaigns through social media influencers, conference presentations, . An industry trade group acknowledged that its traditional customer was “” and in recent years began targeting and who are disproportionately victimized by gun violence.

The Trump administration has moved to reduce federal oversight of gun businesses, announced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as “marked by transparency, accountability, and partnership with the firearms industry.”

The pain of gun violence crosses political, cultural, and geographic divides — but no group has suffered as much as Black people, such as Harris. They were nearly 14 times as likely to die by gun homicide than white people in 2021, , citing federal data. Black men and boys are 6% of the population but of homicide victims.

Washington has offered little relief: Guns remain one of few consumer products the federal government for health and safety.

“The politics of guns in the U.S. are so out of whack with proper priorities that should focus on health and safety and most fundamental rights to live,” said attorney Jon Lowy, founder of , who helped represent Mexico in an unsuccessful lawsuit against Smith & Wesson and other gunmakers that reached the Supreme Court. “The U.S. allows and enables gun industry practices that would be totally unacceptable anywhere else in the world.”

Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News undertook an examination of gun violence during the pandemic, a period when firearm deaths reached an all-time high. Reporters reviewed academic research, congressional reports, and hospital data and interviewed dozens of gun violence and public health experts, gun owners, and victims or their relatives.

The examination found that while public officials imposed restrictions intended to prevent covid’s spread, politicians and regulators helped fuel gun sales — and another public health crisis.

As state and local governments schools, advised residents to stay home, and closed gyms, theaters, malls, and other businesses to stop covid’s spread, President Donald Trump kept gun stores open, critical to the functioning of society.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not respond to interview requests or answer questions about the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce regulation of the firearm industry.

During the pandemic, the federal government gave firearm businesses and groups more than $150 million in financial assistance through the Paycheck Protection Program, even as some businesses reported brisk sales, according to from Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group.

Federal officials said the program would keep people employed, but millions of dollars went to firearm companies that did not say whether it would save any jobs, the report said.

About bought a gun during the first two years of the pandemic, including millions of first-time buyers, according to survey data from NORC at the University of Chicago.

Harris is keenly aware of what drives the demand.

“Guns aren’t going away unless we get to the root of people’s fears,” he said.

most Americans who own a gun feel it makes them safer. But public health data suggests that owning a gun of homicide and triples chances of suicide in a home.

“There’s no evidence that guns provide an increase in protection,” said Kelly Drane, research director for the . “We have been told a fundamental lie.”

Record Deaths

Less than a year into the pandemic, 20-year-old Jacquez Anlage was shot dead in a Jacksonville, Florida, apartment. Five years later, the killing remains unsolved.

His mother, Crystal Anlage, said she fell to her knees and wailed in grief on her lawn when police delivered the news.

She said Jacquez overcame years in the foster care system — living in 36 homes — before she and her husband, Matt, adopted him at age 16.

Jacquez Anlage had just moved into his own apartment when he was shot. He loved animals and wanted to become a veterinary technician. He was kind and loving, Crystal Anlage said, with the 6-foot-4, 215-pound physique of the football and basketball player he’d been.

“He was just getting to a point in life where he felt safe,” Crystal Anlage said.

Gun violence researchers say parents like Crystal Anlage carry trauma that destroys their sense of security.

Anlage said she endures post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. She is terrified of guns and fireworks.

But she has made something meaningful of her son’s killing: She co-founded the Jacksonville Survivors Foundation, which works to raise awareness about the impact of homicide and to support grieving parents.

“Jacquez’s death can’t be in vain,” she said. “I want his legacy to be love.”

His legacy and that of other young men killed by guns is muted by firearm manufacturers’ powerful message of fear.

During the pandemic, gun marketers told Americans they needed firearms to defend themselves against criminals, protesters, unreliable cops, and , filed by gun control advocacy groups with the Federal Trade Commission.

In a since-deleted June 18, 2020, from Lone Wolf Arms, an Idaho-based manufacturer, a protester is depicted being confronted by police officers in riot gear between the words “Defund Police? Defend Yourself,” the petition shows. The caption says, “10% to 25% off demo guns and complete pistols.”

Impact Arms, an online gun seller, on Instagram on Aug. 3, 2020, showing a person putting a rifle in a backpack, the document says. “The world is pretty crazy right now,” the caption reads. “Not a bad idea to pack something more efficient than a handgun.”

The National Rifle Association in 2020 posted on YouTube a of a Black woman holding a rifle and telling viewers they need a gun in the pandemic. “You might be stockpiling up on food right now to get through this current crisis,” she said, “but if you aren’t preparing to defend your property when everything goes wrong, you’re really just stockpiling for somebody else.”

The messaging worked. Background checks for firearm sales soared 60% from , the year the federal government declared a public health emergency.

The same year, more than , the highest number up till then. In 2021, was broken again.

Weapons sold at the beginning of the pandemic were more likely to wind up at crime scenes within a year than in any previous period, according to by Democrats on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, citing ATF data.

Gun manufacturers “used disturbing sales tactics” following mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, “while failing to take even basic steps to monitor the violence and destruction their products have unleashed,” according to a released by congressional Democrats in July 2022 following a House Oversight and Reform Committee investigation of industry practices and profits.

The firearm industry has marketed “to white supremacist and extremist organizations for years, playing on fears of government repression against gun owners and fomenting racial tensions,” the House investigation said. “The increase in racially motivated violence has also led to rising rates of gun ownership among Black Americans, allowing the industry to profit from both white supremacists and their targets.”

In 2024, then-President Joe Biden’s Department of the Interior provided a to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a leading , to help companies market guns to Black Americans.

The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for protecting consumers from deceptive and unfair business practices and has the power to take enforcement action. It issued warnings to companies that made unsubstantiated claims their products could prevent or treat covid, for instance.

But when families of gun violence victims, lawmakers, and advocacy groups in 2022, during Biden’s term, how firearms were marketed to children, people of color, and groups that espouse white supremacy, officials did not announce any public action.

This summer, the National Shooting Sports Foundation pressed its and derided “a coordinated ‘lawfare’ campaign” that it said gun control groups have waged against “constitutionally-protected firearm advertising.”

FTC spokesperson Mitchell Katz declined to comment, saying in an email that the agency does not acknowledge or deny the existence of investigations.

Serena Viswanathan, who retired as an FTC associate director in June, told Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News that the agency lost at least a quarter of the staff in its advertising practices division after Trump came into office in January.

Gun companies Smith & Wesson, Lone Wolf Arms, and Impact Arms did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the National Shooting Sports Foundation or the NRA.

In an August 2022 , Smith & Wesson President and CEO Mark Smith said gun manufacturers were being wrongly blamed by some politicians for the pandemic surge in violence, saying cities experiencing violent crime had “promoted irresponsible, soft-on-crime policies that often treat criminals as victims and victims as criminals.”

He added, “Some now seek to prohibit firearm manufacturers and supporters of the 2nd Amendment from advertising products in a manner designed to remind law-abiding citizens that they have a Constitutional right to bear arms in defense of themselves and their families.”

Guns and Race

In 2015, the National Shooting Sports Foundation gathered supporters at a conference in Savannah, Georgia, and urged the firearm industry to diversify its customer base, according to a and reports from and the .

Competitive shooter Chris Cheng gave a presentation called “Diversity: The Next Big Opportunity.” Screenshots from the conference include slides purporting to show “demographics,” “psychographics,” and “technographics” of Black and Hispanic shooters.

The slides described Black shooters as “expressive and confident socially, in a crowd” and “less likely to be married and to be a college grad.” They said Hispanic shooters were “much more trusting of advertising and celebrities.”

Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, said industry marketing shifted in the latter half of the 20th century as the popularity of hunting declined. The new sales pitch: guns for personal safety.

“They said, ‘We need to break into new markets,’” Suplina said. “They identified women and people of color. They didn’t have a lot of success until the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the death of George Floyd. The marketing says, ‘You deserve the Second Amendment too.’ They are selling the product as an antidote to fear and anxiety.”

Gun manufacturers were harshly criticized in the Oversight Committee’s 2022 investigation for marketing products to people of color, as gun violence remains a leading cause of death for young Black and Latino men.

At the same time, some companies also promoted assault rifles to white supremacist groups who believe a race war is imminent, the investigation found. One company sold an AK-47-style rifle called the “Big Igloo Aloha,” a reference to an anti-government movement, it said.

Still, Philip Smith wants more Black people to get guns for protection.

Smith said he was working as a human resources consultant a decade ago when he got the idea to form the , which helped the National Shooting Sports Foundation compile its report on communicating with Black consumers.

Smith encourages Black people to buy firearms for self-defense and get proper training on how to use them.

After 10 years, Smith said, his group has about 45,000 members nationwide. Single members pay $39 a year and couples $59, which gives them access to discounts from the organization’s corporate partners, including gunmakers, and raffles for gun giveaways, according to its website.

The police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin helped spark early interest from doctors, lawyers, and others in joining the group, he said. But interest took off during the pandemic, he said, even among Democrats who had resisted the idea of owning a gun.

“Hundreds of people called me and said, ‘I don’t agree with anything you’re saying, but what kind of gun should I buy,’” Smith recalled.

Smith, describing himself as “quiet, nerdy, and Afrocentric,” said criticism of guns misses the point.

“My ancestors bled for us to have this right,” he said. “Are there some racist white people? Yes. But we should buy guns because there is a need. No one is forcing us to buy guns.”

‘American Amnesia’

During the pandemic, gun violence took its greatest toll on racially segregated neighborhoods in places such as Philadelphia, where roughly residents live in poverty.

A says a one-year period in the pandemic saw more than 2,300 shootings, or about six a day. Many of the cases haven’t been solved by police.

City officials cited the boom in gun sales in the report: Fewer than 400,000 sales took place in Pennsylvania in 2000, but in 2020 it was more than 1 million.

Gun sales since the pandemic ended, but the harm they’ve caused persists.

At a conference last year inside the Eagles’ football stadium, victims of firearm violence or their relatives joined activists to share accounts of near-death experiences and the grief of losing loved ones.

Paintings flanked the stage and the meeting space to commemorate people who had been fatally shot, nearly all young people of color, under messages such as “You are loved and missed forever” and “Those we love never leave.”

Marion Wilson, a community activist, said he believes the nation has forgotten the suffering Philadelphia and other cities endured during the pandemic.

“We suffer from the disease of American amnesia,” he said.

Harris was on his way home from a job at Burlington Coat Factory nearly two decades ago when robbers followed him from a bus stop and demanded money. He said he had none and was shot.

Harris had spent his early life fixing cars with his grandfather, when he wasn’t at school or attending church. He remembers lying in a hospital bed, overcome with a sense of helplessness.

“I had to learn to feed myself again,” he said. “I was like a baby. I had to learn to sit up so I could use a wheelchair. The only way I got through it was my faith in God.”

Harris endured years of rehabilitation and counseling for PTSD. As someone in a wheelchair, he said, he sometimes fears for his safety — and a gun may be one of the few ways to protect himself and his family.

“I’m mulling it over,” Harris said. “I’m afraid of my trauma hurting someone else. That’s the only reason I haven’t gotten one yet.”

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She found Forbes face down in the street in August 2023, two weeks before he had planned to move away from the empty storefronts, boarded-up houses, and poverty that make this one of the most troubled places in the nation.

Naketra Guy thought about how her son overcame losing his father at age 4 and was the glue of the family. She called him “humble” and “respectful,” a leader in the community and on the football field, where he shined.

Yet he could not outrun the grim statistics of his hometown. Bogalusa posts some of the worst health outcomes and poverty in Louisiana, a state that routinely ranks among the worst nationally in both. And Bogalusa has endured another indicator of poor public health: high levels of gun violence.

Since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, gun violence has shattered any sense of peace or progress here. Louisiana suffers the nation’s second-highest firearm — and Bogalusa, a predominantly Black community with 10,000 residents, has seen dozens of shootings and a violent crime rate approaching twice the national average.

A nearby team refused to play football at Bogalusa High School in fall 2022, .

Bogalusa’s mayor, Tyrin Truong, was elected in 2022 at age 23 on his promises to fix entrenched challenges: few youth programs and good jobs, and perpetual crime and blight.

“I ran for mayor because I got sick of seeing our city painted as mini-New Orleans,” he said, “due to the high levels of youth gun violence.”

In January, the Louisiana State Police , accusing him of soliciting a prostitute and participating in a drug trafficking ring that allegedly used illicit proceeds to buy firearms. He has . “I still haven’t been formally arraigned,” he told Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News in late July, “and I haven’t been charged with anything.”

Every year tens of thousands of Americans — — are killed by gun violence on the scale of a public health epidemic.

Many thousands more are left to recover from severe injuries, crushing medical debt, and the mental health toll of losing loved ones.

Most headlines focus on America’s urban centers, but the numbers also reflect the growth of gun violence in places like Bogalusa, a pinprick of a town 75 miles north of New Orleans. In 2020, the gun violence death rate for rural communities than in large metropolitan areas, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Firearms are the No. 1 killer of children in the U.S., and no group suffers more than . More Black boys and men ages 15 to 24 in 2023 than from the next 15 leading causes of deaths combined. Though overall U.S. homicides after the pandemic ended, adolescent gun deaths climbed even higher in the years after, according to , an associate professor in the School of Public Health at Boston University.

“It has all the markers of an epidemic. It is a major driver of death and disability,” Jay said. “Gun violence does not get the attention it deserves. It is underrecognized because it disproportionately impacts Black and brown people.”

Rather than bolstering efforts to save lives, federal, state, and local government officials have undermined them. Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News undertook an examination of gun violence since the pandemic, a period when firearm death rates surged. Reporters reviewed government reports and academic research and interviewed dozens of health policy experts, activists, and victims or their relatives. They reviewed corporate earnings reports from gun manufacturers and to politicians.

In polling published in 2023 by Â鶹ŮÓÅ, said they or a family member had been impacted by gun violence such as by seeing a shooting or being threatened, injured, or killed with a gun.

American politicians and regulators have put in place laws and practices that have helped enrich firearm and ammunition manufacturers — which tout — even as already damaged by white flight, systemic disinvestment, and other forms of racial discrimination.

President Donald Trump championed gun rights on the campaign trail and has from the National Rifle Association, , “No one will lay a finger on your firearms.” His administration has rolled back efforts under President Joe Biden to address the rise in gun violence.

Emboldened in his second term, Trump to in schools, weaken federal oversight of the gun industry, override state and local gun laws, permit sales , and cut funding for violence intervention.

Trump to review all Biden administration actions that “purport to promote safety but may have impinged on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”

The Biden administration said “” during the pandemic took its greatest toll on racially segregated and high-poverty neighborhoods.

Black youths in four major cities were as white ones to experience a firearm assault, research showed. Gun suicides reached an all-time high, and for the first time the firearm suicide rate among older Black teens surpassed that of older white teens.

In Bogalusa, the pandemic gun violence spread fear. Among the victims killed were a 15-year-old attending a birthday party and a 24-year-old nationally known musician. Thirteen people were injured at a memorial for a man who himself had been shot. Residents said neighbors stopped sitting in their yards because of stray bullets.

Researchers say communities like Bogalusa endure a collective trauma that shatters their sense of safety. Two years after , his mother says that when she leaves home her surviving children worry that she, too, might get shot.

Repercussions from the surge will last years, researchers said: Exposure to shootings increases risk for post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, suicide, depression, substance abuse, and poor school performance for survivors and those who live near them.

“We saw gun violence exposure go up for every group of children except white children, in the cities we studied,” Jay said. “Limits on government funding into gun violence research may stop us from ever knowing exactly why.”

Politics of Pain

The year before Forbes died in Bogalusa, Biden signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, considered the in decades.

In a matter of months, Trump has systematically dismantled key provisions.

Efforts to regulate guns have long proven ineffective against the power of political and business interests that fill the streets with weapons. In 2020, the number of guns manufactured annually in the U.S. hit 11.3 million, more than double a decade earlier, according to . In 2022, the United States had nearly 78,000 , more than its combined number of McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Subway locations, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group.

The Biden administration it would attempt to reduce gun violence by adopting a “zero tolerance” policy toward firearm dealers who committed violations such as failing to run a required background check or selling to someone prohibited from buying a gun.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, which licenses gun dealers, has the authority to enforce laws meant to prevent illegal gun sales. In issuing an executive order, the Trump administration , under Biden, the agency targeted “mom-and-pop shop small businesses who made innocent paperwork errors.”

From October 2010 to February 2022, the agency conducted more than 111,000 inspections, recommending revocation of a dealer’s license only 589 times, about 0.5% of cases, an inspector general’s report said. Even when it cited serious violations, the ATF rarely shut dealers down.

ATF leaders that recommendations for license revocations increased after Biden’s zero-tolerance policy was implemented. In April, the Trump administration .

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy last year declared firearm violence a public health crisis. Within weeks of Trump’s inauguration, the advisory. Of the 15 leading U.S. causes of death, firearm injuries received less research funding from the National Institutes of Health for each person who died than all but poisoning and falls, according to in 2024 by Brady, an anti-gun violence organization. that funding, too.

Trump’s Department of Justice abruptly cut 373 grants in April for projects worth about $820 million, with a large share from gun violence intervention.

“We are going to lose a generation of community violence prevention folks,” said Volkan Topalli, a gun violence researcher at Georgia State University. “People are going to die, I’m sorry to say, but that is the bleak truth of this.”

Asked about its policies, the White House did not address questions about public health considerations around gun violence.

“Illegal violence of any sort is a crime issue, and President Trump has been clear since Day One that he is committed to Making America Safe Again by empowering law enforcement to uphold law and order,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said.

Trump administration officials “want safer streets and less violence,” Topalli said. “They are hurting their cause.”

Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine professor who directs the violence prevention program at the University of California-Davis, was among the first in the nation to consider guns and violence as a public health issue. He said race plays a significant role in perceptions about gun violence.

“People look at the demographic risk for firearm homicide and depending on the demographics of the people in the audience, I can see the transformation in their faces,” Wintemute said. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘Not my people, not my problem.’”

Eroding Gun Restrictions

Trump’s incursions against public health efforts to contain gun violence are backed by lobbying power.

Firearm industry advocacy groups made millions of dollars in political donations in recent years, mostly to conservative causes and Republican candidates. That includes $1.4 million to Trump, , which tracks campaign finance data.

The assassination of civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead to the passage of the federal , which imposed stricter licensing rules and outlawed the sale of firearms and ammunition to felons.

While it remains the law of the land, over time, federal and state government actions have significantly weakened its protections.

Most states now concealed weapons without a permit or background check, even though the practice can increase the risk of firearm homicides.

In Louisiana, Democratic former Gov. John Bel Edwards, in office from 2016 to 2024, that would have allowed people to carry concealed firearms without a permit.

Elected in 2023, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry to allow any person over age 18 to conceal-carry without a permit.

The Trump administration has created his executive order to end most gun regulations and which would allow more people with criminal convictions, including for domestic abuse, to own guns.

Figures vary, but some researchers estimate as many as 500 million guns circulate in the U.S. Sales reached during the pandemic and publicly traded firearm and ammunition companies saw .

Donald Trump Jr. this summer of GrabAGun, an online gun retailer that went public in July under the stock ticker PEW. In a , the company, which markets guns to people ages 18 to 44, cited “ organizations that oppose sales of firearms and ammunition” as threats to its sales growth.

Dave Workman, a gun rights advocate with the , said firearms are not to blame for the surge in pandemic shootings.

“Bad guys are going to do what bad guys are going to do regardless of the law,” Workman said. “Taking away gun rights is not going to reduce crime.”

David Yamane, a Wake Forest University sociology professor and national authority on guns, said the U.S. firearm debate is complex and the industry is often “painted with too broad a brush.”

Most guns will never be used to kill anyone, he said. Americans tend to buy more guns during times of unrest, Yamane added: “It’s part of the American tradition. Guns are seen as a legitimate tool for defending yourself.”

‘A Low Level of Hope’

Once called “,” Bogalusa has become a grim symbol of deindustrialization.

Bogalusa emerged as Black people formed their own communities in the time of Jim Crow racial segregation at the turn of the 20th century.

Racism concentrated Black people in neighborhoods that , reflected in high rates of cancer, asthma, chronic stress, preterm births, pregnancy-related complications — and, over recent decades, .

Thousands flocked to Bogalusa after the Great Southern Lumber Company built one of the world’s biggest sawmills, establishing Bogalusa as a company town. Racial tensions .

Members of the local gained national attention in the 1960s for protecting civil rights organizers from the Ku Klux Klan, that burned houses and churches, terrorizing and killing Black people.

As the mill changed hands over the decades, Bogalusa’s fortunes slid. In the mid-20th century, the population surpassed 20,000, but it is now about half that.

International Paper, based in Tennessee, runs the mill as a containerboard factory, employing about 650 people. In 2021, the state announced incentives for the company that included a $500,000 tax break, saying the move would help bring “prosperity.”

Businesses remain boarded up along the main drag. Houses still bear damage from Hurricane Katrina, and many streets are eerily quiet.

Nearly 1 in 3 people in Bogalusa live in poverty — 2½ times the national average.

Bogalusa’s violent gun crime rate people in 2022, higher than Louisiana’s and 1.7 times the national one, according to the nonprofit Equal Justice USA, citing FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data.

In many rural towns across the South, “there is a level of desperation that is more apparent” than in other parts of the U.S., said , a of social justice and public policy.

“They don’t have the same infrastructure to have robust social services. People are like, ‘What are my life chances?’” Shaefer said. “People feel like there is nothing that can be done. There is a low level of hope.”

Missed Opportunities

Mayor Truong lamented the violence in Bogalusa after Forbes was killed, , “When are we as a community going to come together and decide enough is enough?”

The federal government had offered one path forward.

The Biden administration provided billions of dollars to local governments through the American Rescue Plan Act during the pandemic. Biden urged them to deploy money to community violence intervention programs, shown to by as much as 60%.

A handful of cities seized the opportunity, but most did not. Bogalusa has received since 2021. None appears to have gone toward violence prevention.

The Louisiana legislative auditor, Michael Waguespack, found that Bogalusa used nearly $500,000 for employee bonuses, which his report said may have violated state law. In some cases, says, payments were not tied to work performed.

Bogalusa officials did not respond to a public records request from Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News seeking detailed information about its ARPA money.

Former Mayor Wendy O’Quin-Perrette, who served from 2015 through early 2023, told Waguespack that the city used ARPA money to improve streets and pay the bonuses. “We would not have done it without being sure it was allowed,” she said.

O’Quin-Perrette did not respond to requests for comment.

In a to Waguespack, O’Quin-Perrette’s successor, Truong, wrote that Bogalusa officials didn’t know how the federal money was spent. When he took office, Truong alleged, officials discovered “tens of thousands of dollars of checks and cash” stashed “in various drawers and on desks” in city offices.

Truong defended his stewardship of ARPA funds, saying that about $1 million remained when he assumed office but that the money was needed for more urgent sewer infrastructure repairs. “I wish we could have invested more, invested any money in gun violence prevention efforts,” he said.

In an interview, Truong said the city has been “intentional” about bringing down gun violence, including through a summer jobs program. He pointed to statistics that show homicides decreased from nine in 2022 to two in 2024. “If you keep them busy, they won’t have time to do anything else,” he said.

Asked about his January arrest, Truong said he has political enemies.

“I’m the only Democrat in a very red part of the state, and, you know, I’ve made a lot of changes at City Hall, and that ticks people off,” Truong told Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News. He said that he ended long-standing city contracts with local businesspeople. “When you’re shaking up power structures, you become a target.”

Josie Alexander, for , said city officials missed an opportunity when they didn’t use ARPA funds for gun violence prevention. “The sad thing is people here can now see that money was coming in,” she said. “But it just wasn’t used the way it needed to be.”

‘Too Much Trouble Here’

Truong said the city is still reeling from the . He said he was at Bogalusa High School’s homecoming football game in 2022 when one teen shot another. Shots rang out, Truong said, and he grabbed his 3-month-old son and “laid in the bleachers.”

“It’s not a foreign topic to hardly anybody in town, whether you’ve heard the gunshots in the distance, whether you have attended a funeral of somebody who passed due to gun violence,” he said. Many still grapple with trauma.

In December 2022, Khlilia Daniels said, she hosted a birthday party for her teenage niece, praying no one would bring a gun.

The hosts checked guests for weapons, she said.

Yet gunfire erupted, Daniels said. Three teens were shot, including , who died, according to police.

“When someone you know is killed, you never forget,” said Daniels, 32, who held Taylor until emergency responders arrived.

Tajdryn Forbes was planning his future when he , likely because of a dispute that started on social media over lyrics in a rap song, Guy said.

In a in January, Bogalusa police said they had arrested someone in connection with Forbes’ killing. Authorities had the arrest of a teen in connection with the homicide.

Forbes had been a high school football standout, like his late father, Charles Forbes Jr., who played semipro. When Forbes scored a touchdown, he would look to the sky to honor his dad.

The school praised Forbes for his senior baseball season in : “This young man makes a difference on our campus and on the field with his strong character.”

When hopes for a college football scholarship did not pan out, Forbes worked as a deckhand for a marine transportation company. He saved money, looking forward to moving to Slidell, a suburb of New Orleans.

“He would always say, ‘There’s too much trouble here’” in Bogalusa, Guy recalled.

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The effort, part of Baltimore’s more than $100 million gun violence prevention plan, relies on staffers like Fitzgerald to build trust with people at risk of such violence and offer them resources like housing or food. Researchers believe these programs reduce gun deaths.

Yet one morning in 2019, Fitzgerald said, his oldest son, Deshawn McCoy, then 26, was shot just outside of the neighborhood he patrolled at the time. Fitzgerald said McCoy was a “really beautiful soul,” who fixed dirt bikes at a local garage. McCoy became the city’s , one of 348 that year, among the city’s deadliest. He left behind three daughters.

“This is our zone,” said Fitzgerald, pointing toward McElderry Park. “My son got cooked over here.”

For years, violence intervention was the work of loosely organized, underfunded groups. Then gun violence spiked during the covid pandemic and the Biden administration and Congress poured in money to better integrate such programs within cities. It appeared to help: In Baltimore and beyond, gun violence has plummeted.

The number of homicides in the city dropped 41%, from more than 300 a year in 2021 to 201 in 2024, according to the U.S. attorney’s office in Maryland.

“Gun violence is a sticky, hard problem to solve,” said Daniel Webster, a researcher at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions in Baltimore. “We’re getting it right finally.”

Now President Donald Trump’s administration has gutted funding for that work.

Webster said it could take years to untangle what led to the city’s gun violence drop. Among the factors, he said: the pandemic’s end, investments in violence intervention, improvements that have given police more legitimacy in neighborhoods, targeted prosecutions, and an aggressive effort to remove untraceable ghost guns.

“You need all of these systems working well to have systemic reductions in gun violence,” he said.

The Trump administration has slashed funding for and research, cutting about $500 million in grants to organizations that support public safety.

At the same time, Trump has loosened gun laws the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which oversees gun dealers. He has also sent federal troops into the Democratic-led cities of Chicago; Los Angeles; Memphis, Tennessee; Portland, Oregon; and Washington, D.C.

Webster said cities are still benefiting from pandemic-era efforts to address gun deaths. But given the Trump policy changes, if violence escalates, city leaders could have a hard time keeping it from spiraling out of control.

Trying Something Different

Safe Streets is among the promising violence prevention programs that could lose funding. Staffers in the city’s most violent neighborhoods operate like community health workers.

During the pandemic, the Biden administration provided billions of dollars to local governments through the American Rescue Plan Act. Biden urged them to deploy money to community violence intervention programs, which have been shown to by as much as 60%. His administration to spend Medicaid dollars on such programs. The goal: Stop gun deaths.

Few cities seized the opportunity.

Analyzing federal data, professors Philip Rocco of Marquette University and Amanda Kass of DePaul University found local governments used the ARPA money for 132,451 projects. Yet only 231, less than 0.2%, involved community violence intervention, they said.

In Baltimore, then-newly elected mayor Brandon Scott was ready for the federal influx.

Baltimore’s homicide rate had been high since 2015, when a 25-year-old Black man named Freddie Gray died in police custody. Protests erupted and fractures between residents and police deepened. Baltimore ended the year with 342 homicides, the first time since 1999 that more than 300 were recorded in the city.

“We got really good at our jobs” in the years after Gray’s death, said James Gannon, trauma program manager at Sinai Hospital of Baltimore.

Gun deaths tracked what public health researcher Lawrence T. Brown called the : racially segregated areas that fanned out across Baltimore’s eastern and western neighborhoods around a wealthy central strip. People who faced years of forced displacement and disinvestment , which fueled the cycle.

Every year from 2015 to 2022, the city recorded at least 300 homicides.

“We had to try something different,” said Stefanie Mavronis, director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement. Scott created the agency weeks after he was sworn into office in 2020, later with $50 million in ARPA money and $20 million annually from the city’s budget.

Containing an Outbreak

The office’s budget — $22 million in fiscal year 2026 — is a fraction of the city’s .

Still, the money allowed Baltimore’s leaders to scale up a new approach: addressing gun violence the way public health officials might handle an infectious disease outbreak, Mavronis said.

City staffers identified the small subset of people most at risk of being shot or becoming the next shooter through crime data and referrals from social service workers, hospitals, and violence intervention staff, she said. Mavronis said that gangs, friends willing to engage in violence for each other, and retaliation had been driving gun deaths in the city.

“This never-ending cycle of violence and loss and trauma,” Mavronis said, “comes from that.”

The city convened hospital presidents to connect gunshot victims and their friends and family to counseling, crisis support, and city services.

It offered people help finding therapy, a job, or emergency relocation — and threatened arrest and prosecution if they retaliated.

“We decided that we were no longer going to subscribe to the belief that one thing, one agency, one part of government, one program was going to help cure Baltimore of this disease of gun violence that has had a stranglehold on this city for the entirety of my life,” Scott said.

The Coming Cliff

Baltimore is on pace this year to post its fewest gun deaths since Richard Nixon was president.

“Some of it is the national zeitgeist of the moment,” said Adam Rosenberg, executive director of Center for Hope at LifeBridge Health, which operates Safe Streets sites and the Violence Response Team at Sinai Hospital. He credits mainly the infusion of funding that allowed more resources and hands-on engagement with high-risk communities.

“We typically talk about how poverty affects homicides, but it works in reverse too,” Webster said. “People don’t invest in homes and businesses or, frankly, in people, where people get shot regularly.”

Fitzgerald, who grew up in East Baltimore, said he started working for Safe Streets in 2010 for the paycheck.

He’s been on both sides of gun violence, he said, as someone hit more than a dozen times in shootings — first when he was 12. At 13, Fitzgerald said, he shot a cousin in the leg. Over years, he was in and out of the criminal justice system, including for charges of attempted murder, which helped him understand the people he now works with every day, he said.

No college “can certify you in my experiences in violence,” he said. “That’s what allows me to identify and detect potentially violent situations.”

Today, Fitzgerald, 49, believes that teaching kids trauma coping mechanisms can drive culture change and stop shootings.

“Our kids see more death than soldiers,” he said.

But federal funding is drying up. Anthony Smith, executive director of , which supports local leaders on gun violence reduction, estimates that about 65 groups have lost funding this year. And Trump’s signature legislation slashes nearly $1 trillion in anticipated federal Medicaid spending over the next decade.

Center for Hope lost $1.2 million from federal cuts.

“It’s like a car racing along, and you see the cliff coming,” Rosenberg said. “I don’t know if the resources are there anymore, but the need certainly is.”

Rosenberg said that, because of their experiences, staffers such as Fitzgerald are “incredible messengers” for people involved in gun violence, and he noted that they are thoroughly vetted.

Fitzgerald put it this way: “I’m trying to save my kids, the community. The people we’re trying to save is our friends and our family, and ourselves.”

Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News senior correspondent Fred Clasen-Kelly contributed to this report.

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“When you get shot,” he said, “you stop thinking about the future.”

He is anchored by his wife and child and faith. He once wanted to work as a forklift driver but has built a stable career in information technology. He finds camaraderie with other gunshot survivors and in advocacy.

Still, trauma remains lodged in his daily life. As gun violence surged in the shadows of the covid pandemic, it shook Harris’ fragile sense of security. He moved his family out of Philadelphia to a leafy suburb in Delaware. But a nagging fear of crime persists.

Now he is thinking about buying a gun.

Harris is one of tens of thousands of Americans killed or injured each year by gun violence, a public health crisis that escalated in the pandemic and churns a into a hospital emergency room every half hour.

Over the past two decades, the firearm industry has and stepped up sales campaigns through social media influencers, conference presentations, . An industry trade group acknowledged that its traditional customer was “” and in recent years began targeting and who are disproportionately victimized by gun violence.

The Trump administration has moved to reduce federal oversight of gun businesses, announced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as “marked by transparency, accountability, and partnership with the firearms industry.”

The pain of gun violence crosses political, cultural, and geographic divides — but no group has suffered as much as Black people, such as Harris. They were nearly 14 times as likely to die by gun homicide than white people in 2021, , citing federal data. Black men and boys are 6% of the population but of homicide victims.

Washington has offered little relief: Guns remain one of few consumer products the federal government for health and safety.

“The politics of guns in the U.S. are so out of whack with proper priorities that should focus on health and safety and most fundamental rights to live,” said attorney Jon Lowy, founder of , who helped represent Mexico in an unsuccessful lawsuit against Smith & Wesson and other gunmakers that reached the Supreme Court. “The U.S. allows and enables gun industry practices that would be totally unacceptable anywhere else in the world.”

Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News undertook an examination of gun violence during the pandemic, a period when firearm deaths reached an all-time high. Reporters reviewed academic research, congressional reports, and hospital data and interviewed dozens of gun violence and public health experts, gun owners, and victims or their relatives.

The examination found that while public officials imposed restrictions intended to prevent covid’s spread, politicians and regulators helped fuel gun sales — and another public health crisis.

As state and local governments schools, advised residents to stay home, and closed gyms, theaters, malls, and other businesses to stop covid’s spread, President Donald Trump kept gun stores open, critical to the functioning of society.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai did not respond to interview requests or answer questions about the Trump administration’s efforts to reduce regulation of the firearm industry.

During the pandemic, the federal government gave firearm businesses and groups more than $150 million in financial assistance through the Paycheck Protection Program, even as some businesses reported brisk sales, according to from Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group.

Federal officials said the program would keep people employed, but millions of dollars went to firearm companies that did not say whether it would save any jobs, the report said.

About bought a gun during the first two years of the pandemic, including millions of first-time buyers, according to survey data from NORC at the University of Chicago.

Harris is keenly aware of what drives the demand.

“Guns aren’t going away unless we get to the root of people’s fears,” he said.

most Americans who own a gun feel it makes them safer. But public health data suggests that owning a gun of homicide and triples chances of suicide in a home.

“There’s no evidence that guns provide an increase in protection,” said Kelly Drane, research director for the . “We have been told a fundamental lie.”

Record Deaths

Less than a year into the pandemic, 20-year-old Jacquez Anlage was shot dead in a Jacksonville, Florida, apartment. Five years later, the killing remains unsolved.

His mother, Crystal Anlage, said she fell to her knees and wailed in grief on her lawn when police delivered the news.

She said Jacquez overcame years in the foster care system — living in 36 homes — before she and her husband, Matt, adopted him at age 16.

Jacquez Anlage had just moved into his own apartment when he was shot. He loved animals and wanted to become a veterinary technician. He was kind and loving, Crystal Anlage said, with the 6-foot-4, 215-pound physique of the football and basketball player he’d been.

“He was just getting to a point in life where he felt safe,” Crystal Anlage said.

Gun violence researchers say parents like Crystal Anlage carry trauma that destroys their sense of security.

Anlage said she endures post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety. She is terrified of guns and fireworks.

But she has made something meaningful of her son’s killing: She co-founded the Jacksonville Survivors Foundation, which works to raise awareness about the impact of homicide and to support grieving parents.

“Jacquez’s death can’t be in vain,” she said. “I want his legacy to be love.”

His legacy and that of other young men killed by guns is muted by firearm manufacturers’ powerful message of fear.

During the pandemic, gun marketers told Americans they needed firearms to defend themselves against criminals, protesters, unreliable cops, and , filed by gun control advocacy groups with the Federal Trade Commission.

In a since-deleted June 18, 2020, from Lone Wolf Arms, an Idaho-based manufacturer, a protester is depicted being confronted by police officers in riot gear between the words “Defund Police? Defend Yourself,” the petition shows. The caption says, “10% to 25% off demo guns and complete pistols.”

Impact Arms, an online gun seller, on Instagram on Aug. 3, 2020, showing a person putting a rifle in a backpack, the document says. “The world is pretty crazy right now,” the caption reads. “Not a bad idea to pack something more efficient than a handgun.”

The National Rifle Association in 2020 posted on YouTube a of a Black woman holding a rifle and telling viewers they need a gun in the pandemic. “You might be stockpiling up on food right now to get through this current crisis,” she said, “but if you aren’t preparing to defend your property when everything goes wrong, you’re really just stockpiling for somebody else.”

The messaging worked. Background checks for firearm sales soared 60% from , the year the federal government declared a public health emergency.

The same year, more than , the highest number up till then. In 2021, was broken again.

Weapons sold at the beginning of the pandemic were more likely to wind up at crime scenes within a year than in any previous period, according to by Democrats on Congress’ Joint Economic Committee, citing ATF data.

Gun manufacturers “used disturbing sales tactics” following mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, “while failing to take even basic steps to monitor the violence and destruction their products have unleashed,” according to a released by congressional Democrats in July 2022 following a House Oversight and Reform Committee investigation of industry practices and profits.

The firearm industry has marketed “to white supremacist and extremist organizations for years, playing on fears of government repression against gun owners and fomenting racial tensions,” the House investigation said. “The increase in racially motivated violence has also led to rising rates of gun ownership among Black Americans, allowing the industry to profit from both white supremacists and their targets.”

In 2024, then-President Joe Biden’s Department of the Interior provided a to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a leading , to help companies market guns to Black Americans.

The Federal Trade Commission is responsible for protecting consumers from deceptive and unfair business practices and has the power to take enforcement action. It issued warnings to companies that made unsubstantiated claims their products could prevent or treat covid, for instance.

But when families of gun violence victims, lawmakers, and advocacy groups in 2022, during Biden’s term, how firearms were marketed to children, people of color, and groups that espouse white supremacy, officials did not announce any public action.

This summer, the National Shooting Sports Foundation pressed its and derided “a coordinated ‘lawfare’ campaign” that it said gun control groups have waged against “constitutionally-protected firearm advertising.”

FTC spokesperson Mitchell Katz declined to comment, saying in an email that the agency does not acknowledge or deny the existence of investigations.

Serena Viswanathan, who retired as an FTC associate director in June, told Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News that the agency lost at least a quarter of the staff in its advertising practices division after Trump came into office in January.

Gun companies Smith & Wesson, Lone Wolf Arms, and Impact Arms did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the National Shooting Sports Foundation or the NRA.

In an August 2022 , Smith & Wesson President and CEO Mark Smith said gun manufacturers were being wrongly blamed by some politicians for the pandemic surge in violence, saying cities experiencing violent crime had “promoted irresponsible, soft-on-crime policies that often treat criminals as victims and victims as criminals.”

He added, “Some now seek to prohibit firearm manufacturers and supporters of the 2nd Amendment from advertising products in a manner designed to remind law-abiding citizens that they have a Constitutional right to bear arms in defense of themselves and their families.”

Guns and Race

In 2015, the National Shooting Sports Foundation gathered supporters at a conference in Savannah, Georgia, and urged the firearm industry to diversify its customer base, according to a and reports from and the .

Competitive shooter Chris Cheng gave a presentation called “Diversity: The Next Big Opportunity.” Screenshots from the conference include slides purporting to show “demographics,” “psychographics,” and “technographics” of Black and Hispanic shooters.

The slides described Black shooters as “expressive and confident socially, in a crowd” and “less likely to be married and to be a college grad.” They said Hispanic shooters were “much more trusting of advertising and celebrities.”

Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety, said industry marketing shifted in the latter half of the 20th century as the popularity of hunting declined. The new sales pitch: guns for personal safety.

“They said, ‘We need to break into new markets,’” Suplina said. “They identified women and people of color. They didn’t have a lot of success until the pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the death of George Floyd. The marketing says, ‘You deserve the Second Amendment too.’ They are selling the product as an antidote to fear and anxiety.”

Gun manufacturers were harshly criticized in the Oversight Committee’s 2022 investigation for marketing products to people of color, as gun violence remains a leading cause of death for young Black and Latino men.

At the same time, some companies also promoted assault rifles to white supremacist groups who believe a race war is imminent, the investigation found. One company sold an AK-47-style rifle called the “Big Igloo Aloha,” a reference to an anti-government movement, it said.

Still, Philip Smith wants more Black people to get guns for protection.

Smith said he was working as a human resources consultant a decade ago when he got the idea to form the , which helped the National Shooting Sports Foundation compile its report on communicating with Black consumers.

Smith encourages Black people to buy firearms for self-defense and get proper training on how to use them.

After 10 years, Smith said, his group has about 45,000 members nationwide. Single members pay $39 a year and couples $59, which gives them access to discounts from the organization’s corporate partners, including gunmakers, and raffles for gun giveaways, according to its website.

The police killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and the shooting death of Florida teenager Trayvon Martin helped spark early interest from doctors, lawyers, and others in joining the group, he said. But interest took off during the pandemic, he said, even among Democrats who had resisted the idea of owning a gun.

“Hundreds of people called me and said, ‘I don’t agree with anything you’re saying, but what kind of gun should I buy,’” Smith recalled.

Smith, describing himself as “quiet, nerdy, and Afrocentric,” said criticism of guns misses the point.

“My ancestors bled for us to have this right,” he said. “Are there some racist white people? Yes. But we should buy guns because there is a need. No one is forcing us to buy guns.”

‘American Amnesia’

During the pandemic, gun violence took its greatest toll on racially segregated neighborhoods in places such as Philadelphia, where roughly residents live in poverty.

A says a one-year period in the pandemic saw more than 2,300 shootings, or about six a day. Many of the cases haven’t been solved by police.

City officials cited the boom in gun sales in the report: Fewer than 400,000 sales took place in Pennsylvania in 2000, but in 2020 it was more than 1 million.

Gun sales since the pandemic ended, but the harm they’ve caused persists.

At a conference last year inside the Eagles’ football stadium, victims of firearm violence or their relatives joined activists to share accounts of near-death experiences and the grief of losing loved ones.

Paintings flanked the stage and the meeting space to commemorate people who had been fatally shot, nearly all young people of color, under messages such as “You are loved and missed forever” and “Those we love never leave.”

Marion Wilson, a community activist, said he believes the nation has forgotten the suffering Philadelphia and other cities endured during the pandemic.

“We suffer from the disease of American amnesia,” he said.

Harris was on his way home from a job at Burlington Coat Factory nearly two decades ago when robbers followed him from a bus stop and demanded money. He said he had none and was shot.

Harris had spent his early life fixing cars with his grandfather, when he wasn’t at school or attending church. He remembers lying in a hospital bed, overcome with a sense of helplessness.

“I had to learn to feed myself again,” he said. “I was like a baby. I had to learn to sit up so I could use a wheelchair. The only way I got through it was my faith in God.”

Harris endured years of rehabilitation and counseling for PTSD. As someone in a wheelchair, he said, he sometimes fears for his safety — and a gun may be one of the few ways to protect himself and his family.

“I’m mulling it over,” Harris said. “I’m afraid of my trauma hurting someone else. That’s the only reason I haven’t gotten one yet.”

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She found Forbes face down in the street in August 2023, two weeks before he had planned to move away from the empty storefronts, boarded-up houses, and poverty that make this one of the most troubled places in the nation.

Naketra Guy thought about how her son overcame losing his father at age 4 and was the glue of the family. She called him “humble” and “respectful,” a leader in the community and on the football field, where he shined.

Yet he could not outrun the grim statistics of his hometown. Bogalusa posts some of the worst health outcomes and poverty in Louisiana, a state that routinely ranks among the worst nationally in both. And Bogalusa has endured another indicator of poor public health: high levels of gun violence.

Since the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic, gun violence has shattered any sense of peace or progress here. Louisiana suffers the nation’s second-highest firearm — and Bogalusa, a predominantly Black community with 10,000 residents, has seen dozens of shootings and a violent crime rate approaching twice the national average.

A nearby team refused to play football at Bogalusa High School in fall 2022, .

Bogalusa’s mayor, Tyrin Truong, was elected in 2022 at age 23 on his promises to fix entrenched challenges: few youth programs and good jobs, and perpetual crime and blight.

“I ran for mayor because I got sick of seeing our city painted as mini-New Orleans,” he said, “due to the high levels of youth gun violence.”

In January, the Louisiana State Police , accusing him of soliciting a prostitute and participating in a drug trafficking ring that allegedly used illicit proceeds to buy firearms. He has . “I still haven’t been formally arraigned,” he told Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News in late July, “and I haven’t been charged with anything.”

Every year tens of thousands of Americans — — are killed by gun violence on the scale of a public health epidemic.

Many thousands more are left to recover from severe injuries, crushing medical debt, and the mental health toll of losing loved ones.

Most headlines focus on America’s urban centers, but the numbers also reflect the growth of gun violence in places like Bogalusa, a pinprick of a town 75 miles north of New Orleans. In 2020, the gun violence death rate for rural communities than in large metropolitan areas, according to Johns Hopkins University.

Firearms are the No. 1 killer of children in the U.S., and no group suffers more than . More Black boys and men ages 15 to 24 in 2023 than from the next 15 leading causes of deaths combined. Though overall U.S. homicides after the pandemic ended, adolescent gun deaths climbed even higher in the years after, according to , an associate professor in the School of Public Health at Boston University.

“It has all the markers of an epidemic. It is a major driver of death and disability,” Jay said. “Gun violence does not get the attention it deserves. It is underrecognized because it disproportionately impacts Black and brown people.”

Rather than bolstering efforts to save lives, federal, state, and local government officials have undermined them. Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News undertook an examination of gun violence since the pandemic, a period when firearm death rates surged. Reporters reviewed government reports and academic research and interviewed dozens of health policy experts, activists, and victims or their relatives. They reviewed corporate earnings reports from gun manufacturers and to politicians.

In polling published in 2023 by Â鶹ŮÓÅ, said they or a family member had been impacted by gun violence such as by seeing a shooting or being threatened, injured, or killed with a gun.

American politicians and regulators have put in place laws and practices that have helped enrich firearm and ammunition manufacturers — which tout — even as already damaged by white flight, systemic disinvestment, and other forms of racial discrimination.

President Donald Trump championed gun rights on the campaign trail and has from the National Rifle Association, , “No one will lay a finger on your firearms.” His administration has rolled back efforts under President Joe Biden to address the rise in gun violence.

Emboldened in his second term, Trump to in schools, weaken federal oversight of the gun industry, override state and local gun laws, permit sales , and cut funding for violence intervention.

Trump to review all Biden administration actions that “purport to promote safety but may have impinged on the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens.”

The Biden administration said “” during the pandemic took its greatest toll on racially segregated and high-poverty neighborhoods.

Black youths in four major cities were as white ones to experience a firearm assault, research showed. Gun suicides reached an all-time high, and for the first time the firearm suicide rate among older Black teens surpassed that of older white teens.

In Bogalusa, the pandemic gun violence spread fear. Among the victims killed were a 15-year-old attending a birthday party and a 24-year-old nationally known musician. Thirteen people were injured at a memorial for a man who himself had been shot. Residents said neighbors stopped sitting in their yards because of stray bullets.

Researchers say communities like Bogalusa endure a collective trauma that shatters their sense of safety. Two years after , his mother says that when she leaves home her surviving children worry that she, too, might get shot.

Repercussions from the surge will last years, researchers said: Exposure to shootings increases risk for post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety, suicide, depression, substance abuse, and poor school performance for survivors and those who live near them.

“We saw gun violence exposure go up for every group of children except white children, in the cities we studied,” Jay said. “Limits on government funding into gun violence research may stop us from ever knowing exactly why.”

Politics of Pain

The year before Forbes died in Bogalusa, Biden signed into law the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, considered the in decades.

In a matter of months, Trump has systematically dismantled key provisions.

Efforts to regulate guns have long proven ineffective against the power of political and business interests that fill the streets with weapons. In 2020, the number of guns manufactured annually in the U.S. hit 11.3 million, more than double a decade earlier, according to . In 2022, the United States had nearly 78,000 , more than its combined number of McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Subway locations, according to Everytown for Gun Safety, an advocacy group.

The Biden administration it would attempt to reduce gun violence by adopting a “zero tolerance” policy toward firearm dealers who committed violations such as failing to run a required background check or selling to someone prohibited from buying a gun.

The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, or ATF, which licenses gun dealers, has the authority to enforce laws meant to prevent illegal gun sales. In issuing an executive order, the Trump administration , under Biden, the agency targeted “mom-and-pop shop small businesses who made innocent paperwork errors.”

From October 2010 to February 2022, the agency conducted more than 111,000 inspections, recommending revocation of a dealer’s license only 589 times, about 0.5% of cases, an inspector general’s report said. Even when it cited serious violations, the ATF rarely shut dealers down.

ATF leaders that recommendations for license revocations increased after Biden’s zero-tolerance policy was implemented. In April, the Trump administration .

Surgeon General Vivek Murthy last year declared firearm violence a public health crisis. Within weeks of Trump’s inauguration, the advisory. Of the 15 leading U.S. causes of death, firearm injuries received less research funding from the National Institutes of Health for each person who died than all but poisoning and falls, according to in 2024 by Brady, an anti-gun violence organization. that funding, too.

Trump’s Department of Justice abruptly cut 373 grants in April for projects worth about $820 million, with a large share from gun violence intervention.

“We are going to lose a generation of community violence prevention folks,” said Volkan Topalli, a gun violence researcher at Georgia State University. “People are going to die, I’m sorry to say, but that is the bleak truth of this.”

Asked about its policies, the White House did not address questions about public health considerations around gun violence.

“Illegal violence of any sort is a crime issue, and President Trump has been clear since Day One that he is committed to Making America Safe Again by empowering law enforcement to uphold law and order,” White House spokesperson Kush Desai said.

Trump administration officials “want safer streets and less violence,” Topalli said. “They are hurting their cause.”

Garen Wintemute, an emergency medicine professor who directs the violence prevention program at the University of California-Davis, was among the first in the nation to consider guns and violence as a public health issue. He said race plays a significant role in perceptions about gun violence.

“People look at the demographic risk for firearm homicide and depending on the demographics of the people in the audience, I can see the transformation in their faces,” Wintemute said. “It’s like they’re saying, ‘Not my people, not my problem.’”

Eroding Gun Restrictions

Trump’s incursions against public health efforts to contain gun violence are backed by lobbying power.

Firearm industry advocacy groups made millions of dollars in political donations in recent years, mostly to conservative causes and Republican candidates. That includes $1.4 million to Trump, , which tracks campaign finance data.

The assassination of civil rights icon the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. helped lead to the passage of the federal , which imposed stricter licensing rules and outlawed the sale of firearms and ammunition to felons.

While it remains the law of the land, over time, federal and state government actions have significantly weakened its protections.

Most states now concealed weapons without a permit or background check, even though the practice can increase the risk of firearm homicides.

In Louisiana, Democratic former Gov. John Bel Edwards, in office from 2016 to 2024, that would have allowed people to carry concealed firearms without a permit.

Elected in 2023, Republican Gov. Jeff Landry to allow any person over age 18 to conceal-carry without a permit.

The Trump administration has created his executive order to end most gun regulations and which would allow more people with criminal convictions, including for domestic abuse, to own guns.

Figures vary, but some researchers estimate as many as 500 million guns circulate in the U.S. Sales reached during the pandemic and publicly traded firearm and ammunition companies saw .

Donald Trump Jr. this summer of GrabAGun, an online gun retailer that went public in July under the stock ticker PEW. In a , the company, which markets guns to people ages 18 to 44, cited “ organizations that oppose sales of firearms and ammunition” as threats to its sales growth.

Dave Workman, a gun rights advocate with the , said firearms are not to blame for the surge in pandemic shootings.

“Bad guys are going to do what bad guys are going to do regardless of the law,” Workman said. “Taking away gun rights is not going to reduce crime.”

David Yamane, a Wake Forest University sociology professor and national authority on guns, said the U.S. firearm debate is complex and the industry is often “painted with too broad a brush.”

Most guns will never be used to kill anyone, he said. Americans tend to buy more guns during times of unrest, Yamane added: “It’s part of the American tradition. Guns are seen as a legitimate tool for defending yourself.”

‘A Low Level of Hope’

Once called “,” Bogalusa has become a grim symbol of deindustrialization.

Bogalusa emerged as Black people formed their own communities in the time of Jim Crow racial segregation at the turn of the 20th century.

Racism concentrated Black people in neighborhoods that , reflected in high rates of cancer, asthma, chronic stress, preterm births, pregnancy-related complications — and, over recent decades, .

Thousands flocked to Bogalusa after the Great Southern Lumber Company built one of the world’s biggest sawmills, establishing Bogalusa as a company town. Racial tensions .

Members of the local gained national attention in the 1960s for protecting civil rights organizers from the Ku Klux Klan, that burned houses and churches, terrorizing and killing Black people.

As the mill changed hands over the decades, Bogalusa’s fortunes slid. In the mid-20th century, the population surpassed 20,000, but it is now about half that.

International Paper, based in Tennessee, runs the mill as a containerboard factory, employing about 650 people. In 2021, the state announced incentives for the company that included a $500,000 tax break, saying the move would help bring “prosperity.”

Businesses remain boarded up along the main drag. Houses still bear damage from Hurricane Katrina, and many streets are eerily quiet.

Nearly 1 in 3 people in Bogalusa live in poverty — 2½ times the national average.

Bogalusa’s violent gun crime rate people in 2022, higher than Louisiana’s and 1.7 times the national one, according to the nonprofit Equal Justice USA, citing FBI Uniform Crime Reporting data.

In many rural towns across the South, “there is a level of desperation that is more apparent” than in other parts of the U.S., said , a of social justice and public policy.

“They don’t have the same infrastructure to have robust social services. People are like, ‘What are my life chances?’” Shaefer said. “People feel like there is nothing that can be done. There is a low level of hope.”

Missed Opportunities

Mayor Truong lamented the violence in Bogalusa after Forbes was killed, , “When are we as a community going to come together and decide enough is enough?”

The federal government had offered one path forward.

The Biden administration provided billions of dollars to local governments through the American Rescue Plan Act during the pandemic. Biden urged them to deploy money to community violence intervention programs, shown to by as much as 60%.

A handful of cities seized the opportunity, but most did not. Bogalusa has received since 2021. None appears to have gone toward violence prevention.

The Louisiana legislative auditor, Michael Waguespack, found that Bogalusa used nearly $500,000 for employee bonuses, which his report said may have violated state law. In some cases, says, payments were not tied to work performed.

Bogalusa officials did not respond to a public records request from Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News seeking detailed information about its ARPA money.

Former Mayor Wendy O’Quin-Perrette, who served from 2015 through early 2023, told Waguespack that the city used ARPA money to improve streets and pay the bonuses. “We would not have done it without being sure it was allowed,” she said.

O’Quin-Perrette did not respond to requests for comment.

In a to Waguespack, O’Quin-Perrette’s successor, Truong, wrote that Bogalusa officials didn’t know how the federal money was spent. When he took office, Truong alleged, officials discovered “tens of thousands of dollars of checks and cash” stashed “in various drawers and on desks” in city offices.

Truong defended his stewardship of ARPA funds, saying that about $1 million remained when he assumed office but that the money was needed for more urgent sewer infrastructure repairs. “I wish we could have invested more, invested any money in gun violence prevention efforts,” he said.

In an interview, Truong said the city has been “intentional” about bringing down gun violence, including through a summer jobs program. He pointed to statistics that show homicides decreased from nine in 2022 to two in 2024. “If you keep them busy, they won’t have time to do anything else,” he said.

Asked about his January arrest, Truong said he has political enemies.

“I’m the only Democrat in a very red part of the state, and, you know, I’ve made a lot of changes at City Hall, and that ticks people off,” Truong told Â鶹ŮÓÅ Health News. He said that he ended long-standing city contracts with local businesspeople. “When you’re shaking up power structures, you become a target.”

Josie Alexander, for , said city officials missed an opportunity when they didn’t use ARPA funds for gun violence prevention. “The sad thing is people here can now see that money was coming in,” she said. “But it just wasn’t used the way it needed to be.”

‘Too Much Trouble Here’

Truong said the city is still reeling from the . He said he was at Bogalusa High School’s homecoming football game in 2022 when one teen shot another. Shots rang out, Truong said, and he grabbed his 3-month-old son and “laid in the bleachers.”

“It’s not a foreign topic to hardly anybody in town, whether you’ve heard the gunshots in the distance, whether you have attended a funeral of somebody who passed due to gun violence,” he said. Many still grapple with trauma.

In December 2022, Khlilia Daniels said, she hosted a birthday party for her teenage niece, praying no one would bring a gun.

The hosts checked guests for weapons, she said.

Yet gunfire erupted, Daniels said. Three teens were shot, including , who died, according to police.

“When someone you know is killed, you never forget,” said Daniels, 32, who held Taylor until emergency responders arrived.

Tajdryn Forbes was planning his future when he , likely because of a dispute that started on social media over lyrics in a rap song, Guy said.

In a in January, Bogalusa police said they had arrested someone in connection with Forbes’ killing. Authorities had the arrest of a teen in connection with the homicide.

Forbes had been a high school football standout, like his late father, Charles Forbes Jr., who played semipro. When Forbes scored a touchdown, he would look to the sky to honor his dad.

The school praised Forbes for his senior baseball season in : “This young man makes a difference on our campus and on the field with his strong character.”

When hopes for a college football scholarship did not pan out, Forbes worked as a deckhand for a marine transportation company. He saved money, looking forward to moving to Slidell, a suburb of New Orleans.

“He would always say, ‘There’s too much trouble here’” in Bogalusa, Guy recalled.

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