A recent hit piece on ERPO repeal efforts shows exactly how the Bloomberg-funded outlet launders gun control talking points as journalism — and why gun owners should keep treating its output accordingly.
Give Chip Brownlee this much: the man can write.
His recent piece in the Trace on Republican states rolling back red flag laws is cleanly constructed, well-paced, and professionally edited. It’s also anti-gun propaganda from beginning to end. Those two things are not in tension — they’re the whole business model.
The Trace bills itself as “the only newsroom dedicated to reporting on gun violence.” That line has been repeated so often it gets treated as a given. It shouldn’t be. The Trace is not a newsroom in any honest sense of the word. It’s a messaging shop for the gun control movement, funded by the man who built that movement, and staffed like a communications department instead of a news operation.
Once you understand that, Brownlee’s ERPO story — and everything the Trace publishes — makes a lot more sense.
Follow the money, then follow the org chart
The Trace was launched in 2015 with money from former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. It’s been cashing Bloomberg’s checks ever since. That alone would be worth noting in any story it publishes about gun policy. It gets worse.
John Feinblatt is the president of the Trace. He is also the president of Everytown for Gun Safety — Bloomberg’s flagship gun control group, which describes itself as “the largest gun violence prevention organization in America.” The same person runs both.
Feinblatt has openly said the idea for the Trace came out of Everytown’s frustration at not being able to access the government data it wanted. He pitched the concept to Bloomberg, and the Trace was born. Everytown was its largest donor out of the gate.
Imagine if Smith & Wesson launched an outlet and called it “the only newsroom dedicated to reporting on the Second Amendment,” installed its CEO as publisher, and bankrolled it through the marketing budget. No serious person would call that journalism. But swap in Bloomberg and Everytown, and the media establishment nods along.
And the money is real. According to the Trace’s 2024 IRS Form 990, the editor-in-chief pulled in more than $280,000. A staff writer cleared $170,000. That’s big-city corporate money for a nonprofit “newsroom” of this size.
Twice as many editors as reporters
I’ve worked in four newsrooms. Every one of them had the same shape: a lot more reporters than editors. When I became an editor, I had six reporters under me. That’s what a newsroom looks like — people out gathering facts, a smaller number of people shaping and checking their work.
The Trace is built backwards. According to its own staff page, the Trace has 14 editors and just seven reporters. Twice as many people packaging the message as gathering the facts.
That ratio isn’t an accident. It’s what you’d expect at a communications shop where the framing matters more than the reporting. The Trace cares more about how a story lands than what a reporter actually finds. It has to — the mission is the product.
The ERPO story, by the numbers
Brownlee’s ERPO piece follows the Trace’s house formula with machine precision. Open with a tragedy. Give the first real quote to a gun control advocate. Treat their framing as neutral expert analysis. Then hand the pro-gun side a quote, but surround it with biographical damage.
The first voice in the piece belongs to Emily Walsh at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. The name tells you everything you need to know about where the center stands, but the Trace presents her as a disinterested “law and policy adviser.” Her quote about being “very concerned about the trajectory of anti-ERPO laws” is treated as the baseline reality against which the rest of the story is measured.
The pro-gun side gets Kyle Rittenhouse. And it gets him the Trace way.
Brownlee writes that Rittenhouse, “wearing a pin in the shape of an assault-style rifle on his lapel,” portrayed ERPOs as a way to “weaponize” false accusations. Then the story detours into Kenosha — the shootings, the acquittal, the civil suits that are still pending — before returning to the policy question at hand.
Go look for an equivalent treatment of any gun control advocate quoted by the Trace. You won’t find one. The outlet has never run that kind of character-level scrutiny on an Everytown spokesperson, a Giffords staffer, or a Brady rep. Not once.
Why this matters for gun owners
ERPOs aren’t a sideshow. Red flag laws let the state strip someone of their Second Amendment rights — and, in practice, break down their door — on the strength of an allegation, often with minimal due process. Reasonable people can disagree about whether any version of that regime is workable. What they can’t do is debate it honestly when one side owns the megaphone and pretends the megaphone is a microscope.
That’s what the Trace is. It’s a megaphone wearing a press badge. When mainstream outlets cite it as an authoritative source on gun policy — which they do constantly — they’re effectively laundering Everytown’s press releases through a layer that looks like journalism.
Most gun owners figured this out a long time ago. The Trace has been around for 11 years, and anyone who can tell an AR from an AK stopped taking its output at face value somewhere around year two. The rest of the press is welcome to catch up.
The bottom line
The Trace is not the enemy of good journalism. It’s just not journalism. It’s Everytown’s in-house publication, funded by Bloomberg, run by Bloomberg’s man, staffed like a PR firm, and aimed at exactly the policy outcomes its parent organization exists to achieve.
One more detail worth sitting with: the Trace’s official mailing address is a UPS store in Brooklyn. For “the only newsroom dedicated to reporting on gun violence,” that feels about right.
Lee Williams writes for the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project. The project is reader-supported. Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to support independent pro-gun reporting.
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