On Wednesday morning, Erin Clark got the kind of text no parent wants from their child. There was an active shooter in his school, Apalachee High, in Barrow County, Georgia. He’d heard gunshots. They wrote “I love you” to each other, and she rushed to the school.
When she finally got there — like many other parents, she told the Associated Press, she was running — she found her son in the bleachers of the football field. He was OK. He’d known to barricade the door, to hide. Like most American kids, he’d been prepared for a shooting inside his school.
But others, just as prepared as Clark’s son, were not OK. At least four people were killed and nine others wounded in the attack at Apalachee High School. It was the first deadly school shooting in Georgia since at least 1999, according to The Washington Post, and deadliest in the country since a shooter opened fire inside the Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, in March 2023. It was also a stark reminder that, though gun violence nationwide is trending down, it’s still ever-present in the United States. And in many places similar to Barrow County — an area in the South that’s home to fewer than 1 million people — it’s gotten worse.
Class at Apalachee High, where over 1,900 students were enrolled as of March, had only been in session for a month. Clark told the Associated Press that she’s scared to send her son back. “I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
From The Trace
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Police are increasingly recovering Glocks modified to fire like fully automatic machine guns. The company says there’s nothing it can do. Experts disagree.
By Partnering With Legal Experts, a Chicago Trauma Center Goes Beyond the Emergency Room
Recovery Legal Care helps patients harmed by violence access benefits and social services.
Inside David Hogg’s $8M Bid to Elect Young Progressives
The Parkland school shooting survivor’s PAC has spent millions in state elections nationwide and is already claiming wins at the ballot box.
What to Know This Week
Four people — Simeon Bihesi, 28, Margaret A. Miller, 64, Adrian Collins, 60, and a victim who has not yet been identified — were shot and killed early Monday morning as they slept on a Chicago-area commuter train, prompting calls from community advocates for the city’s transit authority to better protect passengers, and in particular, unhoused people who rely on the transportation system. On Tuesday, a transit employee was shot outside a station in Chicago. Just days before the shootings, a federal judge ruled that an Illinois law banning concealed carry on public transit is unconstitutional; the law remains in effect for all but the plaintiffs in the case. [Block Club Chicago/Chicago Sun-Times/Associated Press]
As the National Rifle Association’s social, political, and financial dominance in the gun rights arena has waned, other groups have scrambled to gain prominence. Now, just ahead of the November election, a new one is entering the mix: the Secure Our Freedom Alliance. The organization’s goal isn’t to compete with the NRA, but instead to convince new gun owners, members of minority groups, and women that “anti-gun liberals are wrong.” [Axios]
An attorney for Polymer80, once the country’s largest manufacturer of ghost guns, asked a judge to remove him from a New York lawsuit seeking to hold the company accountable for the shooting death of a teenage girl, saying in a court document that executives have stopped returning his calls and emails. As The Trace’s Alain Stephens reported last week, Polymer80 has at least temporarily ceased operations. [Gothamist]
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw, who led the agency through the aftermath of the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, announced that he would retire at the end of the year. While members of other law enforcement agencies have been blamed for the catastrophic police response to the massacre, McCraw — and by extension, the officers in his department — have mostly skated by. Last year, he got a raise. [Texas Monthly]
Toronto ranks among the safest cities in the world — but a turf war between rival tow-truck gangs has fueled a 50 percent rise in shootings there, putting residents on edge. Authorities blame a wave of gun smuggling from the U.S. for the violence. [The Wall Street Journal]
In Memoriam
Michael DeHaan, 33, was “just a good dude,” his cousin told The Kansas City Star, the kind of guy who “never met a stranger.” DeHaan was shot and killed in Kansas City, Missouri, late last month. He leaves behind an 11-year-old daughter. DeHaan was witty and kind, a little mischievous and a good neighbor. As a kid, he and his brothers were pranksters, and like typical siblings, often fought about Pokémon cards. DeHaan liked working on cars, and almost always wore gym shorts. “He was an amazing person, inside and out,” his mom told the local NBC station. “Michael had a spark.”
We Recommend
A Maine Camp for Deaf Children Carries On After an Unthinkable Loss
“Joshua Seal, a Deaf man killed in a mass shooting last fall, did not get to see the third season of the camp he started. But 22 Deaf or hard-of-hearing children did, including his own.” [The New York Times]
Pull Quote
“In the time I’ve been here, I’ve trained myself to have two eyes in front and two more on the back of my head.”
— Harshad Shah, who owns a convenience store inside the Chicago-area transit hub that serves the line on which four people were shot and killed Monday, on feeling that security in and around the station is lacking, to Block Club Chicago
