All datasets › Crime
Gun Violence in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables
A dataset of gun-violence news from a global news index, January 2019 – July 2026, built with the Prism News API (historical and real-time news, https://radar-api.fliarbi.com/news). Every row is one news article about shootings or other firearm violence, with its date, location, tone, editorial priority, themes and the organisations it names, plus a link that returns the full article through the API. The dataset measures coverage, not the number of shootings.
Download
Data-platform copies are being published; links appear here as they go live.
Key findings
In a global news index covering January 2019 to July 2026, August 2019, the month of the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings in the United States, was the month in which gun violence took its largest share of news, at 107.95 articles per 10,000 news articles.
Basis: Monthly gun-violence articles divided by all articles in the index for the same month, every month from January 2019 to July 2026 (453,034 matched articles).
May 2022, the month of the Uvalde school shooting, was the month with the second-largest share of gun-violence news between January 2019 and July 2026, at 79.14 articles per 10,000 news articles, after August 2019 (107.95 per 10,000).
Basis: Monthly de-duplicated matched articles (12,376 in May 2022) divided by all articles in the index that month, every month from January 2019 to July 2026.
Gun violence took 23.34 of every 10,000 news articles in 2025, 50.1% less than in 2019 (46.77 per 10,000) and the lowest annual share between 2019 and 2025 (the next lowest was 2024, at 24.1 per 10,000).
Basis: Annual gun-violence articles divided by all articles in the index for the same year, complete years 2019–2025.
Of gun-violence articles carrying a tone label between January 2023 and July 2026, 96.1% were negative in tone, 2.86 times the 33.6% negative share across all news in the same index.
Basis: Top sentiment label of each article, grouped into negative, neutral and positive; 99.9% of sampled articles carry a label.
A machine-assigned news-priority rating placed 96.3% of gun-violence articles at critical priority (7 or higher on a 1–9 scale) between January 2023 and July 2026, 2.26 times the 42.6% share for all news in the same index.
Basis: Top priority label per article; critical = priority ≥ 7.
Charts and maps
Coverage by country
Primary location of located articles, January 2023 – July 2026. Lift = the country's share of this topic's news ÷ its share of all located news (above 1 = over-covered).
| Country | Articles | Share | Lift |
|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 98,419 | 69.75% | 1.44 |
| India | 8,433 | 5.98% | 0.45 |
| Australia | 3,182 | 2.26% | 1.05 |
| Nigeria | 3,082 | 2.18% | 1.59 |
| United Kingdom | 2,940 | 2.08% | 0.36 |
| Canada | 2,577 | 1.83% | 0.85 |
| Israel | 2,188 | 1.55% | 2.77 |
| France | 1,317 | 0.93% | 0.47 |
| Pakistan | 1,232 | 0.87% | 1.93 |
| Mexico | 1,078 | 0.76% | 2.47 |
| Russia | 927 | 0.66% | 0.87 |
| South Africa | 837 | 0.59% | 1.31 |
| Palestine | 812 | 0.58% | 2.78 |
| Brazil | 769 | 0.54% | 0.63 |
| New Zealand | 768 | 0.54% | 0.84 |
Use the API
This dataset was built with the Prism News API, which serves historical and real-time news. Install the command-line client, log in with an API key, and query the topic yourself:
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/fliarbi/prism-news-api/main/scripts/install.sh | bash
prism-news login
prism-news trends "gun violence" --granularity monthly --tableCite
Fliar BI. Gun Violence in the News 2019–2026: article-level dataset and coverage tables. January 2019 – July 2026. https://fliarbi.github.io/news-datasets/gun-violence/