CNN finalizes its ‘Guns in America’ unit

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CNN announced the launch of “Guns in America,” a new beat dedicated to tracking and unpacking all aspects of the complex and divisive issues surrounding guns and gun violence in the country.

The unit will be led by CNN guns and security correspondent Josh Campbell and feature reporting and analysis from Reload founder Stephen Gutowski, The Trace’s Jennifer Mascia and Abené Clayton, reporter on the The Guardian’s “Guns and Lies in America” project, according to the network’s Oct. 19, 2022, announcement.

Together the team will explore who buys and sells guns, who makes and regulates them, and dive into the communities most impacted to help illuminate possible solutions to America’s epidemic of gun violence.

Campbell has work for CNN both domestically and internationally and provides analysis across CNN platforms.

He can often be found deployed to the scenes of critical incidents, helping lead the network’s breaking news coverage of issues involving public safety and security. Campbell won an Emmy in 2021 for reporting on the murder of George Floyd, and continued to break news in the prosecution of the Minnesota officers charged in Floyd’s death.

His work has also gained Emmy nominations for reporting on terrorism and immigration issues, and he was part of the CNN team honored with the 2020 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia Award for coverage on the ground in Istanbul reporting on the murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi. He joined CNN following a career in national security as a supervisory special agent with the FBI.

Gutowski has been writing about guns and politics since he founded his first publication back in 2009. Before that, he spent almost seven years as a staff writer at The Washington Free Beacon. His work has also been published by The Atlantic, The Dispatch, National Review, Ammoland, and The Washington Examiner Magazine.

His reporting has been featured in publications including CNBC, Fox News, The New York Times, Bearing Arms, The Washington Post, NPR, The Drudge Report, ABC News, and many more.

Gutowski was the only journalist to be featured on the cover of Time Magazine’s “Guns in America” edition. Gutowski has won multiple awards for his reporting over the past several years. His work on the show Range Time With Stephen Gutowski received two Telly Awards alongside offerings from publications like CBS News and The Wall Street Journal.

He was named Journalist of the Year by the Second Amendment Foundation in 2016 and most recently received the 2020 Bill of Rights Award from the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.

Mascia is a senior news writer and founding staffer at The Trace, a nonprofit outlet focused exclusively on gun violence that launched in 2015. She previously reported on gun violence for The New York Times, where she began her career as a news assistant.

She also served as the lead writer for the Times’s annual Neediest Cases campaign, which profiles New Yorkers in need, and wrote and produced The Gun Report, a daily tally of gun violence victims in America that launched after the Sandy Hook shooting. She is a graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and CUNY Hunter College. In 2010, she authored a memoir about her father’s criminal past, Never Tell Our Business to Strangers.

Clayton is a reporter in The Guardian’s California office and is currently the lead reporter on the newspaper’s “Guns & Lies in America” series, which launched in 2019. The beat focuses on the impacts of and solutions to community violence. She started covering gun violence in her hometown of Richmond, California, and is now based in Los Angeles – where she covers the people who live in the areas most affected by gun violence.