America's best hope for tracking gun deaths is a mob enforcer's daughter

Mascia expected gang- and drug-related violence would be the leading cause of gun deaths. Instead, she was surprised by the number of killings in which a passing flare-up of emotion – anger, jealousy, fear, sadness – became the final chapter in someone’s life by adding in the deadly efficiency of a gun.

“Until the bullet leaves the chamber, they don't understand the repercussions,” Mascia said. “But it ends up being catastrophic, and that is not understood until you have a bleeding person in front of you.”

Mascia says combing through tragedy after tragedy numbed her to the violence, but every so often a story stood out.

“The most disturbing story I ever covered in the Gun Report was a 79-year-old man who had been diagnosed with cancer,” she said. “And his wife and her sister were in the house and he was bedridden, depressed, and he had a gun and he was going to kill himself. And his wife, who was also 79, walked into the room, and her sister heard her through the door. [The wife] was begging him, ‘Please don’t do this. I love you.’ And he shot and he killed her.”

The man turned the gun on himself, but it misfired. He died in a hospital three days later.

But the ubiquity of gun violence in America didn’t truly become personal for Mascia until Nov. 13, 2013. That's the day she pulled up the Times' homepage and discovered that Ali Eskandarian, a musician she knew, had been shot and killed in Brooklyn, along with two members of the Iranian-American band The Yellow Dogs.

“He was in his living room and a shot came through the window,” Mascia said. “Never in a million years did I think that he would be a victim of gun violence. Never would have crossed my mind.”

In spite of the daily drudgery involved with the Gun Report, a secret from Mascia’s own past helped keep her going: A family history of gun violence that began in 1963 in Owl’s Head Park in Brooklyn. It was there that her father, John Mascia, shot and killed a man for the first time.   “His name was Joe Vitali, his nickname was Joe the Fish, he was a heroin addict,” Mascia said. “My father lured him into the park with the promise of some heroin. And he and an accomplice turned around and shot him to death.”

Mascia discovered later in life that her father had been a mob enforcer. He killed Vitali because he was a suspected police informant. John Mascia was convicted for murder and served 12 years in prison before being paroled. He met Mascia’ mother just before his release.

“My mom was part of a Quaker group that was visiting prisons as a part of the prison-reform movement, which was very big in the late '70s,” she said..

Mascia didn’t find out her father was a murderer until she was 22 and he was dying of cancer. After he passed away, she learned an even darker secret from her mother.

“She said, 'You know how you always asked me, "Did he shoot more than one person?" Well, he did.'”

Her mother confessed that her father had killed up to six other people over drug deals after he got out of prison, crimes for which he was never arrested, never convicted, never paid the price. The weight of her father’s sins helped drive Mascia’s work at The Times.

“I really feel like the Gun Report is my way of atoning for his crimes, or giving back in some way,” Mascia said. “I know I can’t undo the carnage, but if writing about gun violence saves just one life, then it was worth it."