Top Story
The country’s largest ghost gun manufacturer, Polymer80, reached a settlement in a civil lawsuit with Los Angeles, the City Attorney’s Office announced, agreeing to pay $5 million in penalties and adhering to regulations that prohibit the company from selling “buy, build, shoot” kits in California without first conducting a background check and adding serial numbers to its products. [Courthouse News]
From Our Team
On April 16, in Indianapolis, 6-year-old Billy Mack fatally shot himself with a gun that his parents thought was out of his reach. On January 23, in Shreveport, Louisiana, a 5-year-old boy shot his 9-year-old sister with an unsecured handgun he found in their home, wounding her in the arm and stomach. On March 12, in Harris County, Texas, a 3-year-old girl unintentionally killed her 4-year-old sister with a handgun she found in a bedroom.
A Trace reader, moved by tragedies like those above, asked us how often a child unintentionally shoots another child with an unsecured gun. Senior news writer Jennifer Mascia took a look at the data, and reached an unsettling conclusion: Accidental shootings among kids in America occur nearly every other day. Read the latest Ask The Trace →
What to Know Today
As of today, it’s a federal crime to possess an assault-style pistol outfitted with a stabilizing brace, a popular gun accessory that has been used in some recent mass shootings, unless the firearm is registered with the ATF. [The Dallas Morning News] Context: The 5th Circuit granted an injunction against the ATF’s pistol brace regulation last week, but the scope of the ruling was limited to the plaintiffs in the case.
A federal judge ruled that the government can bar people on probation for misdemeanors from possessing guns, among the first opinions since Bruen upholding a gun ban as a probationary condition. [The Washington Post]
In communities across the country, parents are fighting for gun reform at an extremely local level: They’re pushing for changes to municipal zoning ordinances, in order to ban firearm stores from operating near schools. [Reckon]
The trauma of witnessing a shooting can change a young person’s educational outcome. What do students have to say? [WBEZ]
The head of the Rod of Iron Ministries, a controversial religious sect that worships with AR-15s and imagines Jesus Christ as a manufacturer of assault weapons, has a new side gig: turning his sermons into “MAGA rap” to spread far-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories. [VICE]
A police shooting left a Baltimore teenager — who was running away and carrying a gun when an officer shot him, body-worn camera footage shows — in the hospital for 15 days, handcuffed to his bed for the duration, according to his mother. Why did the 17-year-old, whom the cop had reportedly been harassing for days, get charged with assault? [The Baltimore Banner]
More than half of teachers believe carrying firearms on the job would make schools less safe, according to a new survey; about one in five teachers say that arming themselves would make schools safer. [RAND]
In May 2022, before the massacre, Uvalde High School’s mariachi team was ascendant, ready and excited for the next competition season. Over the next school year, as the small Texas city tried to recover from the Robb Elementary attack, the teenagers came together — and finally brought their grieving community a win. [Rolling Stone]
Archive
Ghost Guns Are Everywhere in California: Unserialized weapons, colloquially known as “ghost guns,” entered the American imagination as the creation of hobbyists and backyard tinkerers. But as they’ve grown in popularity, criminals have identified ghost guns as a way to get around California’s restrictive gun laws — and police agencies across the state have been recovering them in record numbers. (May 2019)
