Award-winning journalist explains why he thinks the problem persists and why he chose to profile a Dallas family in his latest article, highlighting the issue.
DALLAS — Joe Sexton is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. One of his first gigs was covering crime as a city reporter for the New York Times in the early 1990s, a time when there were more than 2,000 murders a year in that city.
Decades later, Sexton found himself in Dallas still writing about the same subject and trying to reconcile a crime conundrum: if the murder rate is down nationally, why is gun violence still so high among kids?
“It is difficult to know how to feel exactly if these two things can be true, right? In 2025, we had the lowest murder rate nationally in more than 100 years. At the same time, The Trace does a great job collecting these statistics: 13 million guns sold, 400 mass shootings, 100 people shot every day of every week of every month, 2,000 gun suicides a month, 1,200 children slain by gunfire in America in 2025,” Sexton told us on Y’all-itics. “How is one to feel, right? One, wow, we’re at record low levels, and two, oh my god, the slaughter is extraordinary and unacceptable.”
Sexton’s latest article appears in The Trace, a news organization entirely devoted to covering gun violence. Titled “A World of Hurt,” Sexton profiled a Dallas family and how losing one child was only the start.
Sexton tells us he didn’t have to overthink anything in terms of how tell the story most powerfully because the facts themselves are so “staggering.”
“The sad state of affairs in America is that there’s very little that seems new about gun violence today. It’s sort of the national soundtrack. But I do feel that in a place like Dallas, the scope of things is smaller; it can, the damage can hit you harder,” the journalist relayed.
Something interesting, Sexton says he’s uncovered while writing about gun violence in Dallas, is that investigators and others who study kids and crime have found that one of the best deterrents is for a kid to get a summer job.
And he says his purpose in writing his stories is not to make a case for more or less gun control, but instead to provide context that might help lawmakers envision possible policy changes or even new laws that help address the problem.
“You go ahead, Mr. State Senator or Mrs. State Senator or whatever, you read this {expletive} story, and you tell me, can’t we do something better here,” Sexton asked rhetorically.
Sexton explains why he thinks it’s important to collect what he calls a “national testimony” on gun violence and some of the better ideas he’s heard about how to bring down violence involving kids in our latest episode of Y’all-itics. Listen below to learn more. And you can read Sexton’s story in The Trace online here.