The Living Record

We built the Living Record to make sure your stories aren't lost.

There’s a particular kind of silence that follows gun violence in America. It isn’t the absence of noise, because there’s always noise. Press conferences, social media posts, statistics cycling through the news. But there’s another silence that belongs to the people the noise moves past. The mother who keeps her son’s voicemail saved on a phone she doesn’t use anymore. The brother who learned to flinch at fireworks. The student who maps out every exit before she sits down. Their experiences sit underneath the national conversation, rarely invited into it, almost never on their own terms.

We built the Living Record to change that.

The Living Record is an archive of personal accounts of gun violence in America, shared by the people who lived them. Survivors. Family members. Friends. Neighbors. Anyone whose life has been shaped by this crisis and who wants their experience preserved in their own words. It isn’t a study, and it isn’t a database of incidents. It’s a place where the human weight of gun violence is held with the seriousness it deserves.

For too long, this country has talked about gun violence as something abstract. That framing lets lawmakers treat the crisis as one issue among many. It lets the gun industry keep its distance from the consequences of what it sells. And it lets the rest of the country forget, until the next headline pulls attention back for a few days and then releases it again.

The Living Record refuses that pattern. Each story is a record of something that actually happened to someone real, in a place they can name, on a day they remember. What comes through in these accounts is something the national conversation almost never captures. Grief, yes, but also love. Resilience that didn’t ask to be tested. Memories of people who were funny, stubborn, ordinary, loved. The texture of a life isn’t visible in a statistic. It becomes visible when someone tells you what their sister sounded like when she laughed, or what their father was making for dinner the night everything changed.

If you’ve lived through gun violence in America, or if someone you love has, we’d be honored to hold your story. You don’t have to be a public figure. You don’t have to know what to say before you start. Some accounts are long. Some are a few sentences. The country has spent decades treating gun violence as background noise. The Living Record is one way of refusing that. It’s a place where the people this crisis has touched can speak, and be heard, and stay.

We hope you’ll add your voice.