Trump administration erases school shooting victims at ATF headquarters

Jaime Guttenberg’s family should have been celebrating her college graduation this weekend.

Her family has known that would not be happening ever since Feb. 14, 2018, when 14-year-old Jaime was one of the 17 people killed in the horrific mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. But what was always going to be a difficult weekend for the Guttenbergs became even harder when they discovered the Trump administration was reportedly eliminating a memorial to victims of gun violence.

Jaime’s father, Fred Guttenberg, an advocate for gun control, worked with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) in Washington, DC to help create the memorial, which was unveiled last year. On a phone call Tuesday morning, he told me that the news of the elimination of the memorial, first reported by the Washington Post on Sunday, is more proof that the Trump administration “doesn’t actually care about violence in America.”

The memorial consisted of about 120 rotating photographs of victims of school shootings, domestic violence homicides, police officers killed on duty, and other victims of gun violence. An accompanying digital kiosk also told the stories of the victims. Jaime and a few other Parkland students were among the initial group of victims memorialized.

Jaime’s portrait on the wall showed her smiling in a white top, and her accompanying biography on the digital kiosk noted that she was a competitive dancer who loved dogs, stood up to bullies, and would be remembered by her family for her smile and laugh. “The intent wasn’t to be anti-gun, it was to tell the stories of those who unfortunately have been victims of gun violence,” Guttenberg told me of the memorial.

Gun control advocates called the news insulting to victims of gun violence and their families.

Newton Action Alliance, an organization started by parents whose children died in the horrific Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting, wrote in a Bluesky post that the news suggests “the Trump Administration has no desire to honor the gun violence victims with action.” Sandy Hook victims were also among those memorialized on the wall, according to the Post. The pictures were slated to change annually in order to continue honoring more victims of gun violence, according to the Justice Department’s announcement last year.

“This is a slap in the face to victims and survivors everywhere,” wrote Giffords, the gun violence advocacy organization, in a post on X.

The advocacy organization Everytown for Gun Safety wrote on Bluesky that the Trump administration “continues to go out of its way to insult victims and survivors of gun violence.”

Spokespeople for the ATF did not respond to questions from Mother Jones. A spokesperson for the Justice Department, which the ATF is part of, told the Post that the agency is considering other ways to honor victims and that the removal of the memorial was not political.

The news is part of a pattern for the Trump administration of bolstering gun rights while undermining support for victims of gun violence. As I reported last month, the DOJ canceled hundreds of grants that supported victims of gun violence, addiction, and domestic violence. That coverage led the DOJ to subsequently reverse two of the canceled grants. Since resuming office, Trump shut down the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and set the stage to undo years of progress on reducing gun violence, as my colleague Mark Follman wrote. Trump then directed Attorney General Pam Bondi to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies” from Biden’s term to assess whether they “infringe on the Second Amendment rights” of Americans. 

In response, Bondi announced the creation of a task force “to use litigation and policy to advance, protect, and promote compliance with the Second Amendment.” Also in March, Bondi also reportedly restored gun rights to ten people with criminal convictions, including actor Mel Gibson, who had a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction. Trump’s budget proposal seeks to cut nearly $500 million in funding to the ATF, which enforces federal gun laws and helps investigate violent crimes, alleging that the Biden administration “used the ATF to attack gun-owning Americans and undermine the Second Amendment.”

For Guttenberg, having Jaime’s picture on the wall was part of a promise he made to make sure her murder was not in vain. “When my daughter was killed, I set out on a mission to make sure nobody ever forgets her, to make sure her voice will always be a voice in the fight to reduce gun violence in America,” he told me. “Having her picture there and her story there is a part of that.”

“It was perfectly appropriate that this memorial existed there,” he added, “and it is horribly sad that it doesn’t anymore.”