Featured Story
An Indiana judge ruled that the City of Gary’s decades-old lawsuit against a suite of gunmakers can proceed despite a new state law designed to quash it. The law, passed by Indiana’s GOP supermajority this year, bans local governments from suing firearms manufacturers and sellers. In 1999, Gary’s mayor filed the suit against gunmakers that he believed were knowingly flooding his city with illegal firearms. [ProPublica/WFYI]
From The Trace
In August 2023, the Second Amendment Foundation filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of Donald Willey, a locally infamous resident of the small Maryland community of Hoopers Island. A county official had used the state’s red flag law to submit a petition for an extreme-risk protection order against Willey, and a judge granted it. Willey was briefly forced to surrender his firearms.
The Second Amendment Foundation’s suit portrayed Willey, a Marine Corps veteran, as an innocent victim “relentlessly pursued” by government authorities, and the official who filed the petition against him as drunk on power. But the lawsuit failed to acknowledge Willey’s numerous battles with neighbors, his history of highly erratic behavior, nor that he had effectively converted his home into a junkyard.
Now, a vast trove of documents and months of reporting reveals how the Second Amendment Foundation distorted the narrative to serve a larger objective. Just two days after filing the Willey suit, the group announced an initiative to challenge red flag laws across the country. The initiative’s name? “Capture the Flag.”
In his latest investigation, produced in partnership with Rolling Stone, The Trace’s Mike Spies tells the story.
What to Know Today
Children are especially vulnerable to the stresses of gun violence. For the young people who were injured or survived the mass shooting at a Super Bowl parade in Kansas City, Missouri, in February, the harm has changed them, and continues to pervade everyday life. [KFF Health News and KCUR]
Project Unloaded, a nonprofit that works to increase awareness of the dangers associated with owning a gun, selected a group of Philadelphia teenagers as the winner of a gun violence prevention social media competition. The teens, all members of a West Philly violence reduction program, produced a series of short videos about how shootings have changed public life in their city. [The Philadelphia Inquirer]
The Supreme Court appears unlikely to consider the constitutionality of assault-style weapons bans anytime soon, much to the chagrin of gun rights groups. Why do these polarizing measures stand, at least for now, on seemingly solid ground? [HuffPost]
Earlier this year, the conviction of James and Jennifer Crumbley, the parents of a then-teenage school shooter, revived questions about when parents bear responsibility for a massacre carried out by their child. That debate is playing out again in a small county courtroom in Galveston, Texas, where the parents of a 17-year-old shooter, who killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School in 2018, are on trial — this time in civil court. [The New York Times]
Archive
Friends Don’t Let Friends Buy Guns
Public health messaging once convinced young people to buckle up and stop smoking. In the TikTok era, a new set of activists is clarifying the dangers posed by firearms. (April 2024)
