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The gun industry trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, reclaimed on its website in 2024 that through its partnership with the country’s leader suicide prevention organization, “more than 800,000” brochures on firearm suicide prevention had been “distributed.”
The statistic was presented as evidence of success eight years after the collaboration was announced, to great public acclaim, in 2016. But it was unclear to whom those pamphlets had been distributed 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 figure is, at best, tremendously misleading.
Magied served as AFSP’s Ohio area director from 2020 to 2022, and recalled that when the job began, she walked into a local storage unit rented by the organization and saw “at least a thousand AFSP-NSSF pamphlets there, collecting dust.”
During Magied’s time at AFSP, he would bulk order brochures, keep a bunch in his work bag, and then place them on a table at AFSP events. “I didn’t take an inventory,” Maggied says. “I had no idea how many people took them or how many were gone. And not once did anyone ask me.” He adds: “There was absolutely no tracking of how many people took or received pamphlets, much less who took or received a pamphlet.”
Maggied, 42, says that even if the amount had been discernible, it would have had little meaning. “We were told never to ask a person directly if they owned a gun,” he says. “So if someone took a leaflet, we had no idea why.”
Hailed as a breakthrough in nonpartisan public health coordination, the NSSF-AFSP partnership has introduced its co-branded brochures as the centerpiece of its collaboration. The pamphlets, which comprise six pages of text, describe warning signs, provide information on helplines and note that firearms are used in half of all suicides. They also include information about safe gun storage and advise readers to directly ask a person exhibiting concerning behaviors if they are considering suicide.
But the partnership has failed to reduce firearm suicide, an epidemic that has worsened considerably over time, going from fewer than 23,000 deaths a year at the start of the collaboration 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 achieve the “audacious goal” of reducing the country’s suicide rate by 20 percent over 10 years, the partnership was used to generate goodwill among policymakers and the public, as well as raise money. During the following decade, a recent investigation by The Trail and rolling stone As revealed, the partnership has been fundamentally undermined by the prioritization of the gun industry’s messages and interests. The partnership still exists, but AFSP secretly closed Project 2025 about 18 months early, removing the deadline from the audacious goal.
Magied’s recollections align with the experience of another former AFSP employee who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. The trail and rolling stone He also reviewed court documents that included statements from gun store owners who were NSSF members and expressed hospitality toward AFSP-NSSF pamphlets, as well as testimony from a researcher beloved by the gun industry who weighed in on the association’s intentions. Together, the interviews and records help further illuminate what could be leading to the failure of the collaboration.
For years, the former employee who did not want to be identified was directly involved in the AFSP-NSSF partnership. After an event, the former employee says, “it is never tracked what materials and how many were distributed,” adding, “There is no way to know if the people taking information are gun owners or not.”
While it makes sense for AFSP representatives to distribute leaflets, the participation of thousands of gun dealers and shooting ranges who belong to the NSSF is key to the association’s concept. They are trusted to make brochures available to their clients and ensure materials get into the right hands.
But a lawsuit in 2022 raised questions about whether NSSF members were actually agreeing to the collaboration, potentially adding another troubling element to the association’s shortcomings.
That year, Anne Arundel County, Maryland, enacted a law require gun stores to make the pamphlets “visible and available at the point of sale” and provide one to anyone who purchases a firearm or ammunition. The ordinance seemed unlikely to provoke a backlash given that the literature was co-produced by the NSSF. But after the law went into effect, Anne Arundel’s stores rebelled. Four of them joined together to file a lawsuit to dismantle the statute.
The county was represented by attorneys from Everytown for Gun Safety, which also provides annual grants to The Trace. During the interrogation of the lawyers, court documents On the program, store representatives expressed their desire to remain silent on the issue of suicide. One of them, Donna Worthy, who disclosed her company’s membership in the NSSF, said in her statement that she was “not familiar” with the NSSF’s policy advocacy. He said the distribution of the leaflets seemed “accusatory” to customers and implied that “they have these problems.” Worthy, who did not respond to a request for comment, added: “I feel like we’re forced to take a position on this when we’d rather stay silent.”
These themes were consistently expressed by the plaintiffs in the case, which was ultimately resolved in the county’s favor. “I don’t want to expose my customers to that,” the general manager of a store called Cindy’s Hot Shots said of the flyers. One store owner, Micah Schaefer, added that the materials “singled” customers, who were put off by the message that “having access to lethal means puts you at risk for suicide.” When it came to the brochures, he said, “conversations arose” that his company “would prefer not to participate in.”
Schaefer confirmed in an interview that at the time of the lawsuit he was a member of the NSSF. Before Anne Arundel enacted her charter, she had not heard of the organization’s association with the AFSP and was never asked to participate in it. Another plaintiff, whose store, like Schaefer’s, is now closed, does not remember whether it belonged to the NSSF. Cindy’s Hot Shots declined to comment.
The former AFSP employee who spent years working at the NSSF association said there was no systematic data collection to determine how many leaflets NSSF members had handed out to customers, or whether members were actively engaging customers on the topic of suicide prevention in their stores.
In January 2024, when the NSSF said in its website Although the association had distributed 800,000 brochures, the group also claimed that the program had issued more than 8,000 NSSF-AFSP suicide prevention tool kits, or about one to each of its retail and range members, according to a presentation by a senior AFSP employee. The toolkits include brochures, as well as in-store signage and guidance on “the steps to take if a death by suicide occurs at your business.” In early summer 2025, the NSSF said in a affair from its official publication, ShootingBusinessthat from July 2017 to 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 of this story, leaving unanswered questions about whether the groups tracked how many NSSF members have actually displayed flyers at any point over the past decade, or whether they have data on which NSSF members currently make flyers available to customers. The organizations also would not say whether they had an empirical basis for knowing how many gun owners have received pamphlets.
Meanwhile, the Anne Arundel case also raised uncomfortable questions about the motives of the association. The plaintiffs brought in as an expert witness one of the gun industry’s favorite researchers, Gary Kleck, professor emeritus of criminology and criminal justice at Florida State University. Gun rights groups seeking to undo gun restrictions often hire him for hundreds of dollars an hour to provide analysis on why a particular gun regulation lacks effectiveness. 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 attorney for Everytown asked Kleck what the purpose of producing the pamphlets was.
“Well, the NSSF is, you know, an advocate for the interests of firearms manufacturers, and they would certainly like to do anything to reduce the likelihood of lawsuits being filed against firearms manufacturers, and specifically lawsuits related to suicides,” Kleck said. “And so, you know, they provide a justification for the manufacturers to not be responsible in any way for the suicides by saying, hey, we distributed these pamphlets and, through the firearms retailers, people were warned.”
Kleck admitted that his comments about the NSSF were a matter of “speculation.” But he added: “I don’t know if they have interests [sic] in protecting the interests of gun owners beyond what is involved in protecting the interests of firearms manufacturers.”
When the trail and rolling stone When asked if Kleck stands by his comments, he said, “Yes, I still believe that.”
