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This story is published in partnership with The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence. Subscribe to its newsletters. The gun industry’s trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, claimed on its website in 2024 that through its partnership with the country’s leading suicide prevention organization, “more than 800,000” brochures about preventing gun suicide had been “distributed.” The statistic was presented as evidence of success eight years after the collaboration was announced, to public acclaim, in 2016. But it wasn’t clear who those brochures had been distributed to, and whether they had actually reached their intended audience: gun owners and their loved ones. Sarah Maggied, a former employee of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, tells The Trace and Rolling Stone that the number is at best wildly misleading. Maggied served as AFSP’s Ohio area director from 2020 to 2022, and recalled that when she started the job, she entered a local storage unit rented by the organization and saw “at least a thousand AFSP-NSSF brochures just sitting there, collecting dust.” During Maggied’s time at AFSP, she would place bulk orders for the brochures, keep a bunch in her work bag, and then set them out on a table at AFSP events. “I didn’t take inventory,” Maggied says. “I had no idea how many people took them, or how many were gone. And not once did someone ask me.” She adds: “There was absolutely no tracking of how many people took or were handed brochures, much less who took or was handed a brochure.” Maggied, who is 42, says that even if the quantity had been discernable, it would have had little meaning. “We were told to never directly ask a person if they were a gun owner,” she says. “So if someone took a brochure, we had no idea why.” Hailed as a breakthrough in nonpartisan public health coordination, the NSSF-AFSP partnership has presented their co-branded brochures as the linchpin of their collaboration. The pamphlets, comprising six pages of text, outline warning signs, provide information about helplines, and note that firearms are used in half of all suicides. They also include information about secure gun storage and advise readers to directly ask a person exhibiting concerning behaviors if they’re considering suicide. But the partnership has failed to reduce gun suicide, an epidemic that has considerably worsened over time, rising from less than 23,000 deaths a year at the collaboration’s start to more than 27,000 nearly a decade later. Born out of an AFSP initiative called Project 2025, a program the group created in 2015 to acheive the “bold goal” of lowering the nation’s suicide rate 20 percent in 10 years, the partnership was used to build goodwill among policymakers and the public, as well as raise money. Over the ensuing decade, a recent investigation by The Trace and Rolling Stone revealed, the partnership has been undermined in essential ways by the prioritization of messaging and the interests of the gun industry. The partnership still exists, but AFSP secretly shuttered Project 2025 some 18 months early, eliminating the bold goal’s deadline. Editor’s picks Maggied’s recollections align with the experience of another former AFSP employee who spoke under the condition of anonymity out of fear of retribution. The Trace and Rolling Stone also reviewed court documents that included depositions of gun store owners who were NSSF members and expressed hostility toward the AFSP-NSSF brochures, as well as the testimony of a researcher beloved by the gun industry who questioned the partnership’s intentions. Taken together, the interviews and records help further illuminate what could be leading to the collaboration’s lack of success. Related Content For years, the former employee who did not want to be named had direct involvement in the AFSP-NSSF partnership. After an event, the former employee says, “what materials and how many were distributed was never tracked,” adding: “There’s no way to know if the people taking information are gun owners or not.” While it makes sense that AFSP representatives distribute brochures, the participation of thousands of gun sellers and ranges who belong to the NSSF is key to the partnership’s concept. They are relied upon to make the brochures available to their customers and ensure that the materials reach the right hands. But a lawsuit in 2022 raised questions about whether NSSF members were really buying into the collaboration, potentially adding another troubling element to the partnership’s shortcomings. That year, Maryland’s Anne Arundel County enacted a law requiring gun stores to make the brochures “visible and available at the point of sale” and give one to any person buying a firearm or ammunition. The ordinance seemed unlikely to prompt a backlash given that the literature was co-produced by the NSSF. But after the law went into effect, shops in Anne Arundel revolted. Four of them banded together to sue to dismantle the statute. The county was represented by attorneys from Everytown for Gun Safety, which also provides annual grants to The Trace. Under lawyers’ questioning, court documents show, store representatives expressed their desire to stay silent on the subject of suicide. One of them, Donna Worthy, who disclosed her business’ NSSF membership, said in her deposition that she was “unfamiliar” with the NSSF’s policy advocacy. She said that distributing the brochures came off as “accusatory” to customers and implied that “they have these issues.” Worthy, who did not respond to a request for comment, added, “I feel we’re forced to have a position on this when we would prefer to remain silent.” These themes were consistently voiced by the plaintiffs in the case, which was ultimately resolved in favor of the county. “I don’t want to expose my customers to that,” a general manager of a shop called Cindy’s Hot Shots testified about the brochures. A store owner named Micah Schaefer added that the materials “singled out” customers, who were put off by the message that “having access to lethal means puts you at a risk for suicide.” When it came to the brochures, he said, “conversations arose” that his business “would prefer to not be involved in.” Schaefer confirmed in an interview that at the time of the lawsuit he was an NSSF member. Before Anne Arundel enacted its statute, he had not heard about the organization’s partnership with AFSP, and was never asked to participate in it. Another plaintiff, whose shop, like Schaefer’s, is now closed, doesn’t remember whether he belonged to the NSSF. Cindy’s Hot Shots declined to comment. The former AFSP employee who spent years working on the NSSF partnership said there was no systematic collection of data that would make it possible to determine how many brochures had been handed to customers by NSSF members, or whether members were actively engaging customers on the subject of suicide prevention in their stores. In January 2024, when the NSSF said on its website that the partnership had distributed 800,000 brochures, the group also stated that the program had issued more than 8,000 NSSF-AFSP suicide prevention toolkits, or roughly one for each of its retail and range members, according to a presentation by a senior AFSP employee. The toolkits include the brochures, as well as in-store signage and guidance on “steps to take should a death by suicide occur at your business.” In early summer 2025, the NSSF said in an issue of its official publication, Shot Business, that from July 2017 through January 2025 the organization had shipped more than 11,250 suicide prevention toolkits. The NSSF and AFSP did not provide a comment in response to an email detailing the reporting for this story, leaving unanswered questions about whether the groups tracked how many NSSF members have actually displayed brochures at any point over the last decade, or whether they have data on which NSSF members currently make the brochures available to customers. The organizations also would not say if they had an empirical basis for knowing how many gun owners have received brochures. Meanwhile, the Anne Arundel case also raised uncomfortable questions about the reasons for the partnership. The plaintiffs brought in as an expert witness one of the gun industry’s favored researchers, Gary Kleck, an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University. Gun rights groups seeking to undo gun restrictions frequently hire him for hundreds of dollars an hour to provide analysis about why a particular gun regulation lacks efficacy. The NSSF has hired Kleck on multiple occasions, and cites his research on its website. During his deposition, a copy of which is part of the public record, an Everytown lawyer asked Kleck what purpose the production of the brochures served. “Well, NSSF is, you know, an advocate for the interest of firearms manufacturers, and they’d certainly like to do anything to reduce the likelihood of lawsuits being brought against firearms manufacturers, and specifically lawsuits in connection with suicides,” Kleck said. “And so, you know, they provide a justification for the manufacturers not being responsible in any way for suicides by saying, hey, we distributed these pamphlets, and through retail dealers of firearms, people were forewarned.” Trending Stories Kleck allowed that his comments about the NSSF were a matter of “speculation.” But, he added, “I don’t know that they have any interests [sic] in protecting the interests of gun owners above and beyond what is implied by protecting the interests of firearms manufacturers.” When The Trace and Rolling Stone asked Kleck if he stands by his comments, he said, “Yes, I continue to believe that.”
