A couple of years ago, a Trace reader asked for recommendations of books about the gun violence issue. You can find our first list of recommended reading here. We missed a few that should have been on that original list, and since then, even more books on the topic have come along. And so we decided it was time to update our roundup. 

Our recommendations may vary in style, but our goal is to provide readers a well-rounded list that will contextualize the most important issues on the gun beat today.

Josiah Bates was writing about gun violence long before he joined The Trace last year. “In These Streets” is Bates’s first book, written outside his last job reporting on criminal justice and published in May 2024. It is a lyrical examination of inner-city gun violence — its causes and effects, and the efforts to prevent it. Violence reduction researcher Thomas Abt put it well: “If you want to understand gun violence but don’t know where to start, start here.”

People are at the center of this book, and Bates shares their experiences — and some of his own — with a directness that might leave you feeling raw. But readers will also come away with a realistic view of this crisis — and perhaps some hope about what can be done to stop the bloodshed.

In the violence prevention sphere, “Unforgiving Places” is the book of the moment. That’s for good reason: Author Jens Ludwig, a University of Chicago behavioral economist, presents a deceptively simple strategy for addressing gun violence: finding ways to interrupt interpersonal violence that is rarely premeditated. In doing so, he offers a reality check on dominant theories from the ideological left and right about the causes of and solutions to the crisis. You can learn more about the book in Trace reporter Rita Oceguera’s interview with Ludwig. 

Trace reader Kristen Mahoney also recommended “Unforgiving Places”: “I’ve heard Dr Ludwig present on this book to an audience of state officials, mayors, and police chiefs, and they were all equally really engaged,” Mahoney told us. “I think it is because there’s good science and practical discussion in the book so it speaks to a lot of different audiences.”

“American Gun” is much more than a history of the AR-15. It’s a story of American cynicism, paranoia, and death. This deeply researched book  delivers a blunt chronicle of the AR-15’s evolution, the machinations of the gun market, and the lives that were taken as the rifle became not only a bestseller, but also a symbol of a certain kind of America.

“With commanding authority,” The Trace’s Mike Spies wrote in a review for The New York Times, “‘American Gun’ lays out the unvarnished truth about an industry where the conversion of fear into profit, along with an ever-mounting civilian body count, causes few pangs of conscience.”

The Supreme Court’s 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen upended Second Amendment law with its mandate that gun regulations align with the country’s “history and tradition.” The Trace’s Chip Brownlee has chronicled the fallout in his series “The Bruen Era,” the most recent installment of which lays out the decision’s consequences for the court system. 

Saul Cornell is a prominent historian who has served as an expert in dozens of post-Bruen firearms cases. “A Well-Regulated Militia” is a thorough account of what the gun debate looked like in American antiquity. Understanding that history has become newly urgent over the past three years.

Where did America’s gun rights culture come from?

Political scientist Alexandra Filindra argues that it can be traced back to the country’s origins, and that it’s been embedded in some of our most powerful institutions — the military and the National Rifle Association — ever since. 

Filindra’s examination ties contemporary pro-gun advocacy to the Revolutionary era, when the ideologies of the most powerful members of society rested on maintaining dominance. That worldview, she says, remains at the fore of the most extreme gun rights movements today — and as the fringe drifts closer and closer to the mainstream, it becomes more important to understand its lineage.

In the introduction to “What We’ve Become,” physician and scholar Jonathan M. Metzl makes his point of view clear, identifying himself as a gun safety advocate and a member of the community affected by the book’s narrative backbone, the 2018 mass shooting at a Waffle House in Antioch, Tennessee, in which a white man opened fire on a restaurant full of young Black and Latino patrons. 

The context is the point. Metzl’s book is a reckoning with the politics of gun reform. He finds that creating safer communities can’t start and end with firearm restrictions. The issue on its own is too divisive. Instead, he argues, gun violence prevention should be part of a broader movement that advocates for solutions to common public problems, one that can unite Americans of different backgrounds under a coalition for civic safety.

Metzl wrote about “What We’ve Become” in a commentary piece for The Trace last year.

The first victims of the United States’ gun violence epidemic were Native Americans. This history, along with the fact that Indigenous people continue to be disproportionately victimized by state violence, is too often neglected in conversations about gun violence.

Toni Jensen, a Métis woman who grew up around guns, connects that history with her personal experiences of contemporary gun violence, resulting in a riveting, insightful analysis of the American cultural ills that produce such frequent shootings. Jensen’s reflections on mass shootings, domestic violence, and Native history, told through elegant prose, create a book that is far more than the sum of its parts.

When a stunningly horrific event takes place, like the daytime murder of 19 children and two teachers just before the start of summer break, it seems like the whole world swirls around it for a while. Tragedies like the one on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, are an open wound. 

If you want to know how a mass shooting scars a community, you can do little better than “Uvalde’s Darkest Hour,” by Craig Garnett, the owner and publisher of the Uvalde Leader-News. It is beautifully, tenderly written, and it will make your heart ache. You will not want to read it in one sitting. But it is worth spending time with.

In the spring of 1970, members of the Ohio National Guard opened fire on a crowd of anti-war protesters at Kent State University, killing four students and injuring nine others. Historian Brian VanDeMark probes what presaged the events that day — the fury over Vietnam, the governor’s incendiary comments about student demonstrators, the deployment of young National Guard troops who were not trained to deal with student protests — and what came after, like the national rhetoric that the shootings were deserved and the survivors’ long quest for justice and recognition. The latter journey will ring all too familiar to anyone who has experienced gun violence.

VanDeMark’s account of a divided country engulfed in rage and the ineptitude that ended in the killing of four young people feels newly relevant today. The Trace’s Jennifer Mascia spoke with VanDeMark about the parallels between 1970 and today.

The raid on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and the 51-day standoff that ensued in the spring of 1993 was an inflection point for two key actors in America’s gun debate: the militant far right and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

The ATF’s initial raid was a catastrophic misstep, resulting in a shootout that killed four agents and five Branch Davidians. The siege ended when a fire broke out and killed 76 people, including more than two dozen children, in the compound. The militant anti-government movement used the Waco siege as an animating event, “proof” that the government is trying to take away your guns. It became a battle cry for militias, white supremacists, and domestic terrorists.

Many of the contours of America’s gun rights extremist movement can be traced back to the Waco siege. Jeff Guinn’s book is a well-researched, sensitive portrayal of this important moment and its legacy.

Bruce Hoffman and Jacob Ware, experts on domestic terror affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations, provide a definitive overview of far-right extremist violence in the United States. Their book covers the rise of the movement and the threat it poses today. “God, Guns, and Sedition” was published before the Trump administration stepped back from the fight against domestic extremist violence, and it has gained increased importance for those who want to know how to counter contemporary domestic terror.