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When it comes to gun violence, it can be easy to move from issue to issue, or tragic shooting to tragic shooting, without stopping to check what progress has been made. The end of the year is always a good time to stop and reflect — and 2023 held some encouraging developments. 

For this year’s final edition of The Trajectory, reporter Chip Brownlee looked back on how gun violence, policy, and solutions changed in 2023 — and what it could indicate about the year to come.

Read more from The Trace → 

What to Know Today

The NYPD has agreed to end its practice of withholding body camera footage of officer-involved shootings from New York City’s Civilian Complaint Review Board, which is tasked with investigating police misconduct. The agreement follows an investigation published last week by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. [ProPublica]

Baltimore is suing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for what the city alleges is an improper refusal to release gun crime data. If fulfilled, the city’s Freedom of Information Act request will reveal the top 10 sources of crime guns in Baltimore between 2018 and 2022. [CBS News]

Next year, all 3,300 Washington, D.C., police officers will train how to — without the use of firearms — peacefully resolve situations involving people in crisis or armed with weapons that aren’t guns, like knives and bats. [The Washington Post]

The Biden administration is withholding a shipment of more than 27,000 U.S.-made rifles to Israel’s national police over fears that they might be distributed to extremist settlers in the West Bank. [The Wall Street Journal]

The Florida Supreme Court declined to take up a challenge to the constitutionality of the state’s barring of felons from possessing firearms. The appeal centered on the argument that the Bruen decision ought not apply only to law-abiding citizens. [CBS News Miami]

Archive

St. Louis Has Never Shared Police Shooting Investigation Results With Its Civilian Oversight Board: In 2021, five years after its creation, the St. Louis Civilian Oversight Board had never received any materials from the city’s Police Department to review a single one of more than 50 officer-involved shootings. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department led the nation in killings by officers, accounting for 18 deaths per one million residents. (April 2021)

Sunny Sone
Sunny is in charge of our newsletters, leading the growth of existing products and dreaming up new ones. They previously worked as a copy editor at The Intercept and as digital editor for the Texas Observer, and co-published a web-only magazine under the Brick House media cooperative. Sunny has covered topics ranging from the Texas funeral industry to the life of visionary composer Pauline Oliveros. They hold a degree in journalism from the University of Texas at Austin.
Agya K. Aning

Agya K. Aning is The Trace’s inaugural editing fellow. Previously, he covered environmental justice for Inside Climate News, and before that he lived in China and Taiwan, where he taught English as a second language and studied Mandarin. He grew up in southwest Virginia and earned a master’s degree in investigative journalism from Arizona State University. At one time, he was decent at the electric and bass guitars.