Good morning, Bulletin readers. Another American workday ended in horror as gunmen injured seven in separate rampages at a Wisconsin office building and a Pennsylvania courthouse. Plus, the man behind a notorious 3D-printed-gun company is facing felony charges for sex with a minor — and could lose his gun rights. Those stories and more, below.
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WHAT TO KNOW TODAY
Gun control ads have skyrocketed this election season. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that ads promoting stricter gun regulations have aired more than 100,000 times across the country this year — a 22-fold increase from four years ago. Anti-gun-reform ads also increased over the same period, but by a smaller margin.
Cody Wilson, 3-D printed gunmaker, was charged with child sexual assault. Wilson’s Texas company entered the national spotlight this summer during a legal battle involving 3D-printed gun blueprints, which he sees as nullifying all gun restrictions. Court documents allege that Wilson met a 16-year-old girl online and sexually assaulted her at a Texas hotel. If convicted, Wilson would be barred from owning firearms. His last known location was Taiwan, where he did not board a return flight to the United States, according to Austin police.
NRA magazine subscriptions have increased this year, suggesting a spike in membership. There is no independently verified count of the National Rifle Association’s membership, but a recent report from the gun group shows that it added about 350,000 subscribers to its four flagship magazines between February and June, reversing a previous decline.
A California Republican falsely claimed he hasn’t received donations from the NRA for his re-election bid. Representative Steve Knight made the statement in a recent podcast interview. But documents from the Federal Election Commission reveal that the gun group has made three donations to his campaign this election cycle. Fact-check your candidates: Our NRA spending tracker analyzes FEC reports to show you exactly how much the group is putting into local races.
Three people were injured in a shooting at a Wisconsin software company. A gunman opened fire at an office building in a Madison suburb Wednesday morning, wounding three people before he was shot by police. The motive for the shooting is not yet known. The same day, multiple people were shot at a Pennsylvania courthouse. The incident may have started as a domestic dispute, a local news outlet reported, and ended when the suspect was fatally shot by police. Four people, including an officer, were wounded.
A man died after shooting himself in the chest at a gun range. Vincent Alfonso Carrozza, 23, shot himself with a gun he rented from a Simpsonville, South Carolina, gun shop on Monday. The man had been shooting in a rental lane in an otherwise empty range when he fired the shot. He later died at the hospital.
ONE LAST THING
One of the nation’s oldest red flag laws is rarely used. In 2016, California passed a law allowing family members, roommates, and cops to ask a judge to temporarily block potentially dangerous people from buying guns. But the law has been used fewer than 200 times during its first two years on the books.
As The Trace reported earlier this year, some California cities want to make better use of the tool. In 2017, San Diego launched an initiative to ensure that civil gun-seizure orders are issued as frequently as possible, and are done so correctly. In the first two months of this year, prosecutors in San Diego filed nine gun violence restraining orders, a significantly faster pace than during the first 24 months after the law went into effect.
