Why making Long Shadow was "a masterclass in gun history"
The Trace’s Jennifer Mascia discusses working on Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust and shares gun-violence journalism that “shook me out of my stupor.”
Nearly a decade ago, Jennifer Mascia became a founding staffer at The Trace, a nonpartisan, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to covering the America’s gun violence epidemic. Today, she is a senior news writer at the outlet. “I didn’t expect to ever get into this beat,” she tells Depth Perception. “It’s kind of an intractable problem in American society. It’s not a beat where you’re like, ‘That’s what I want to take!’”
Mascia first began covering gun violence as an editorial assistant for the New York Times opinion columnist Joe Nocera. “I was not sure what the next phase of my career was going to be,” she recalls. “And then Sandy Hook happened. Joe had a young son at the time, and he was really shaken.” So Nocera launched the Gun Report, a blog that reported on the everyday gun violence incidents that don’t get the kind of coverage that mass shootings do. Eventually, Mascia took over writing the blog, which ran for 16 months, until June 2014, when she joined The Trace.
More recently, Mascia served as a co-reporter and contributing producer for the third season of Long Lead’s podcast hosted by Garrett Graff, Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust, produced in collaboration with The Trace. Mascia appears on a couple episodes of the podcast, which concludes this week with the episode “Generation Lockdown.”
“It was like a masterclass in gun history,” Mascia says of her experience working on In Guns We Trust. “There were days when it was emotional. I was working with the producer, Emily Martinez, and we’d sit there with a whiteboard. And we get into it, and I’d start crying, like, recounting Columbine, and all of these frustrations about things that could have taken a different turn in American society but didn’t.”
Depth Perception recently asked Mascia to share her list of the best podcasts, videos, and longform articles about gun violence from the past decade. “Every once in a while, I’ll come across a story or a piece of content that will reach me, which is hard when you’ve been doing this for more than 10 years,” she says. “And these are the ones that kind of shook me out of my stupor, my numbness, and said, ‘Wait a second, feel something.’” —Mark Yarm
Listen to Long Shadow: In Guns We Trust from the beginning, and experience what the Spectator calls “a gripping podcast, providing a map for the evolution of a grim status quo.”
All episodes are available now on the Long Shadow website or wherever you get your podcasts.
“Life and death on the lost streets of Chicago,” BBC video report (Sept. 7, 2016)
“I come back to this year after year. It’s hard to equate gun rights with ‘freedom’ when you see how unfettered gun proliferation can be a prison. The part that always gets me [12:49] is when a young man strapped to the teeth chokes up and says he and his friends can’t even go to the beach without a gun: ‘This ain’t normal.’”
The Gun Machine, Episode 8: “The Leftovers: How do you account for the true cost of gun violence?,” WBUR podcast (Nov. 22, 2023)
“The best thing The Trace ever produced. After seven episodes showing how the federal government and the gun industry are intertwined, [host] Alain Stephens opens a vein and talks about finding his father dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound when he was 21. He tearfully interviews a family friend about why his family never spoke with him about it. That’s right: Alain’s family has never discussed it with him. It got swept under the rug. Very few journalists are willing to tie their personal experiences to their beat, particularly when their beat is guns.”
“The Reckoning” by Andrew Solomon, The New Yorker (March 10, 2014)
“Nobody wants to hear from mass shooters’ families; they’re seen as complicit, particularly when the shooter is young. So when they speak out it’s a big deal (like Sue Klebold’s TED Talk, which could be its own entry). This interview ends with Peter Lanza, father of the Sandy Hook shooter, wishing his son was never born. That’s a stunning statement, even for someone whose child is a mass killer. But we see how he got to that point, and how mental health intervention over a period of years might not be enough to prevent massacres in a country with such easy gun access.”
“Inside the Federal Bureau Of Way Too Many Guns,” by Jeanne Marie Laskas, GQ (Aug. 30, 2016)
“Another one I come back to year after year is about the analog way ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] agents are forced to trace guns in the digital age because of NRA-backed laws limiting their information-collecting abilities. Charlie Houser, who ran the tracing center in West Virginia for many years, takes us through the Rube Goldberg machine that is crime-gun tracing in America — an unnecessarily drawn-out process that leaves shooters free to strike again.”
“He was paralyzed in a shooting, but she still wanted to marry him. Now that future is gone,” by Petula Dvorak, the Washington Post (May 18, 2017)
“Petula Dvorak was interviewing a shooting survivor five weeks after he was paralyzed in an armed robbery when he suddenly collapsed; hours later he was dead. Dvorak and her photographer had unwittingly captured his last moments. This one sticks with me; I can’t imagine how difficult it must have been to write this column.”