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WHAT TO KNOW TODAY
Eight people were shot at a gas station in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. One of the victims died in the Sunday incident, which was one of at least eight mass shootings this weekend, according to Gun Violence Archive. Six people were shot at a block party in Rochester, New York, and four teenagers and a 10-year-old boy were wounded when someone opened fire at a playground in Wilmington, Delaware.
Analysis challenges perceptions of school shootings by highlighting risks to students of color. The Government Accountability Office examined more than 300 school shootings collected in a database maintained by the Naval Postgraduate School. The report’s key finding: “Urban, poorer, and high minority schools had more shootings overall, with more characterized as a dispute or grievance,” while “suburban and rural, wealthier, and low minority schools had more suicides and school-targeted shootings, which had the highest fatalities per incident.”
Amid calls to defund police, one city is adding cops to address gun violence. Paterson, New Jersey, is hiring 10 officers through a $1.88 million Justice Department grant. “We are dealing with a pandemic,” Mayor Andre Sayegh said. “But let’s be realistic, we have an American epidemic with gun violence.” The city suffered a mass shooting last week that claimed four lives and left three others injured.
Police seized the AR-15 a white St. Louis couple brandished at Black Lives Matter protesters. A gun store is offering to replace it. A lawyer for Mark and Patricia McCloskey told Forbes that they’ve also heard from “50 people” who want to buy them a new assault-style rifle after officers took the one Mark McCloskey pointed at demonstrators who were walking past his mansion last month. As The Trace explained here, charges in the case may be elusive because of Missouri’s expansive self-defense laws.
Bump stock maker seeks share of money set aside for families of Las Vegas mass shooting victims. Slide Fire Solutions, a defunct manufacturer of the gadgets that enable semiautomatic weapons to mimic fully automatic gunfire, has filed a claim against the gunman’s $1.4 million estate, The New York Post reports. The company is seeking compensation in case it’s ordered to pay damages as part of a class-action lawsuit alleging its products were responsible for the massacre. Lawyers for the gunman’s estate, who are working on distributing its holdings to relatives of his victims, say that the legal costs of fighting Slide Fire’s suit could exhaust those fund altogether. Slide Fire shut down its business before the federal ban on bump stocks took effect last year.
After a campaign led by a former gun industry lobbyist, the Trump administration rescinded a restriction on silencer exports. The State Department rolled back a 2002 regulation that allowed sales of American-made gunshot suppressors to foreign militaries and law enforcement, but not to citizens of other countries. The New York Times revealed that the White House lawyer who pushed for the reversal, Michael B. Williams, is a former general counsel at the American Suppressor Association and once served as a law clerk for the National Rifle Association. The ban had been imposed to prevent hostile actors from obtaining American weapons to use on American troops during the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
Two Texas officers were fatally shot during a domestic assault call. McAllen Police Department officers Edelmiro Garza, 45, and Ismael Chavez, 39, were ambushed as they approached a suspect’s home on Saturday. The gunman then died by suicide. The Trace has reported on why domestic violence calls are among the most dangerous for officers.
DATA POINT
Fifteen people were shot in a 15-hour span in New York City over the weekend. [New York Post]
