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The U.S. saw another holiday weekend wracked by gun violence. In a Chicago suburb, 23 people were shot, one fatally, at a Juneteenth block party. One person was killed and nine others were injured at a party in St. Louis. Another person was killed in a mass shooting in Greenville, North Carolina; five others were injured.
All told, more than 100 people were killed this weekend in all types of shootings.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, which defines mass shootings as four or more people shot, there were 17 such events from Saturday through Sunday. In the same period last year, there were seven. Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri St. Louis, told The Los Angeles Times that this “particularly violent weekend” shouldn’t be taken as a sign of spiking homicide rates. Initial data indicates that homicides are decreasing, even as mass shootings “have been distressingly common over the last few years,” he said.
From Our Team
As Philadelphia’s gun-driven homicide rate hit record highs in recent years, the city started funding grassroots organizations to help reach potential victims and perpetrators. The most expensive of these efforts was the Community Expansion Grant Program, which allocated a combined $13.5 million to 31 organizations for intervention work that wrapped up this spring.
Now, as the city prepares to announce a new round of grantees, news reports and even some grantees are raising questions about the program’s effectiveness. Some of the organizations, which received between $100,000 and $1 million apiece, struggled to meet their stated goals. Others have dropped out altogether. The Trace’s Mensah M. Dean explains why the program brought mixed results — and what could happen next.
What to Know Today
A new CDC report shows that homicides and suicides among young people jumped sharply during the pandemic; the homicide rate for teenagers reached its highest point in nearly 25 years. Guns were used in the vast majority of homicides among 10- to 24-year-olds in 2021. [Associated Press]
The shooter who killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 — the deadliest antisemitic attack in U.S. history — was found guilty of all 63 criminal counts he’d been charged with, including hate crimes resulting in death. [CBS]
A Navy base in Gulfport, Mississippi, installed more than 20 shipping containers along its southern edge to ward off stray bullets, after gunfire at an apartment complex across the street damaged five homes on the base last year. It’s just one sign of the toll of gun violence in Mississippi’s second-largest city. [NBC]
The number of reports of guns stolen from cars in the Houston area surged between 2021 and 2022 — and 2023 data indicates that the trend is only accelerating. [Houston Landing] Context: In 2016, The Trace reported that privately owned firearms are stolen in America with alarming frequency. Cars and trucks are easy targets.
As Oklahoma lawmakers loosen the state’s gun restrictions, Tulsa’s police chief is calling for reform: “We are operating as though everything is normal,” he said, “and I don’t think everything is normal.” It’s a sharp pivot from his tone last year, when he responded to a mass shooting by saying firearm regulations should be left up to the Legislature. [NPR]
Attorneys for the city of Minneapolis asked a federal court to dismiss a lawsuit against the police officer who shot and killed Amir Locke in February 2022. They filed the motion one day before the release of a Justice Department report detailing widespread racism and brutality by the Minneapolis Police Department. [Mother Jones]
Data Point
318 — the number of mass shootings so far this year. At the same point last year, there had been 280. [Gun Violence Archive]
