On June 18, the anti-gun propaganda mill The Trace celebrated its tenth birthday with a self-congratulatory article entitled “How The Trace Came to Be and Other Stories From Our Early Days.” The fact that The Trace is still around reflects at least two things about the firearm prohibition movement. One, it is funded by people with more money than good sense. Two, these people will continue throwing money at the project to ban guns, regardless of whether it produces results.
NRA-ILA (which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year) reported on The Trace’s beginnings with the headline: “Bloomberg to Launch Proprietary Anti-Gun Media Arm.”
Michael Bloomberg is a longtime funder of the firearm prohibition movement and a living embodiment of its most obnoxious tendencies. As one of the world’s richest men, he is shielded from the realities of ordinary life and protected wherever he goes by armed security. He has virtually nothing in common with the average American but is dedicated to using his inexhaustible riches to force the rest of humanity to conform to his own values and worldview.
Yet all that money couldn’t buy him the love or esteem of the American people. Bloomberg quietly receded from public life after spending over $1 billion in a failed bid to represent the Democrat Party in the 2020 presidential campaign. As NRA-ILA noted in its postmortem of Bloomberg’s campaign:
[A]fter spending over $1 billion dollars of his own money, far more than any individual has ever spent in U.S. history, the former New York City Mayor never exceeded third place in any state where he was on the ballot. His only victory was in American Samoa; a territory whose annual budget is less than half of what Bloomberg spent in roughly three months.
Recently, Bloomberg is more talked about for spending money to try to control the planet’s climate than to ban America’s guns. But his legacy gun control organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, is still funding The Trace (along with other infamously anti-gun foundations, including Joyce, Levis Strauss, and MacArthur).
Much like Bloomberg’s ill-fated presidential campaign, however, there is precious little to show for their largesse. Indeed, one of the biggest gun-related stories of the past decade has been the embrace of Second Amendment rights by women, minorities, and other nontraditional gun owners, a trend The Trace tried to downplay but couldn’t ignore. There have also been multiple pro-gun victories at the U.S. Supreme Court, including reaffirmation of the right to carry handguns in public and rejection of Mexico’s $10 billion lawsuit against the U.S. gun industry. Permitless concealed carry is now the majority rule among U.S. states, and the Second Amendment has strong backers in the White House, the U.S. Capitol, and the U.S. Supreme Court. All this occurred during The Trace’s watch.
While there was a sprawling federal gun control law passed in 2022, the current administration is rolling back the Biden-Harris regime’s attempts to expand it through the rulemaking process. DOJ and ATF have been substantially overhauled, to the point where ATF is announcing a “new era of reform,” and DOJ is taking historically pro-gun positions in litigation and in investigations by its Civil Rights Division.
Firearm policy is, however, more partisan than in the past. Anti-gun states continue to push the envelope of prohibitive laws. And a few formerly pro-gun or moderate states have enacted far-reaching gun control. Whether these phenomena will prove to be irreversible, however, remains to be seen.
Yet, on the whole, firearms remain as popular, widespread, and firmly entrenched in American culture as ever.
In the meantime – after a decade of anti-gun advocacy, funded by institutional and individual gun control advocates – The Trace continues to insist on its journalistic integrity and “editorial independence.”
To the contrary, even in the tarnished landscape of contemporary “journalism,” The Trace distinguishes itself for hackery and disingenuousness. The “real” mainstream press at least has to spread its bias over a number of issues. The Trace, however, is wholly dedicated to relentlessly conditioning its readers to believe that firearms are a menace to society and that expansive gun control is the only solution. It strives to be a counterpart to the NRA’s own online presence, but with stories written by people who don’t understand firearms, firearm owners, firearms law, or gun culture.
Even Everytown seems to be hedging its bets with The Trace, launching its own “Research & Policy” wing to create seemingly overlapping content it hopes will be uncritically adopted and spread by media allies. Spoiler alert: the “solutions” suggested by this “research” are dozens of extreme and unconstitutional gun control laws.
Anti-gun advocates can dress up their efforts up however they want, whether with “medicine,” “law,” “journalism,” or whatever. At the end of the day, all roads in the “gun violence prevention” world lead to those same drastic and unconstitutional solutions.
That’s why we’ll continue to report on their antics. And we’ll do it from an unabashedly and transparently pro-gun viewpoint.
True, we don’t have Bloomberg’s billions backing us up.
But, fortunately, it doesn’t take as much money to tell the truth about firearms in the U.S. as it does to try to convince Americans to give up their guns.
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