Gun Violence in the News, 2019–2026: Peaks, Geography and Tone of Global Shooting Coverage, and How It Compares with Research and Invention

We measure how gun violence was covered in a global news index from January 2019 to July 2026, using 453,034 de-duplicated articles about shootings and other firearm violence, and set that coverage beside 4,639 research papers (2015–2025) and 407 patent families (2015–2024) on the topic. Six results stand out: Event-driven peaks. Gun violence took its largest share of news in August 2019, at 107.95 articles per 10,000, the month of the El Paso and Dayton mass shootings. May 2022 had the second-largest share (79.14 per 10,000). Falling share. The topic took 23.34 of every 10,000 news articles in 2025, 50.1% less than in 2019 (46.77) and below the 2020 level (24.94). Geography. The United States holds 69.75% of located gun-violence news, 1.44 times its share of all news. Among the 25 countries with the most located coverage, Serbia (6.47), Jamaica (4.26) and Ecuador (3.67) are the most over-represented, and Germany (0.22), Spain (0.27) and Japan (0.29) the least. Within India, Manipur (5.57), Punjab (3.95) and Jammu and Kashmir (3.26) lead; within the United States, Minnesota (4.0), New Mexico (3.73) and Rhode Island (3.08). Shifting attention. Between 2023 and 2025 the topic's share of national news rose 4.94-fold in Sweden and 3.48-fold in Australia, and fell in France, Canada and Israel. Tone and urgency. 96.1% of gun-violence articles are negative in tone (all news: 33.6%), and 96.3% are rated critical priority (all news: 42.6%). Research and invention. Papers on gun violence rose from 0.36 to 0.79 per 10,000 papers between 2015 and 2025, a 2.19-fold rise in share. The patent side is small: 407 families, with China's office holding 38.8% of office filings and the United States office 35.4%.