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The Supreme Court struck down a Trump-era regulation that effectively banned bump stocks, devices that make semiautomatic rifles fire more like machine guns and were used in the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history. The majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, apparently included material pasted from an amicus brief by the Firearms Policy Coalition, a deeply libertarian gun rights group that has gained prominence in recent years. [The Trace/Slate]
From The Trace
Not too long ago, a handful of Philadelphia Police Department cars swarmed the street bordering Russell Conwell Middle School, a magnet school in the city’s Kensington neighborhood. While officers confirmed they weren’t investigating anything involving the school — which is housed in a 98-year-old, fortress-like building — the sudden police presence wasn’t an unusual experience for students and educators, who know that the sound of gunfire will interrupt some of their school days.
The dysfunction around Conwell has earned it an unenviable national distinction: the school with the most shootings near its building during the last 10 years.
In thousands of communities across America, children are traumatized in their classrooms — not from bullets fired within, but from violence happening outside school walls. Shootings near campuses have become disturbingly common for K-12 students: A new Trace analysis found that between 2014 and 2023, there were at least 188,080 shootings within 500 yards of a U.S. school.
That averages out to 57 shootings a day near a school in the United States. The Trace’s Olga Pierce, Jennifer Mascia, and Mensah M. Dean have more in the latest installments of our series, “A Decade of American Gun Violence.”
Just Outside the School Gate, America’s Gun Violence Epidemic Surrounds Its Students
Every day, an average of 57 shootings occur near a school in the United States, according to a new analysis by The Trace.
In Philadelphia, Community Violence Comes to School
Thousands of U.S. schools have experienced nearby shootings over the last decade. Of the 100 that saw the most, 18 were in Philadelphia.
What to Know Today
For years, research has shown that in the majority of American homes, an unsecured gun is more likely to result in an accidental death or suicide than be used in defense against a home invasion. A new CDC study quantified the risk: Among eight states with available data, about half of people who said they kept a loaded firearm in or around their home stored at least one of them unlocked. Among families with children, that figure was at least 25 percent. [USA TODAY]
The Chicago Police Department has faced sharp criticism for tolerating officers with ties to extremist groups. Earlier this year, the department created a list of “criminal and biased organizations” that police are forbidden from joining — but none of the far-right groups that officers have been associated with, such as the Oath Keepers and Ku Klux Klan, appear on the registry. [WBEZ]
A sweeping Justice Department investigation found that police in Phoenix, the country’s fifth-largest city, have a pattern of discriminating against Black, Hispanic, and Native American people and using excessive force. Investigators found that officers shoot at people who pose no imminent threat, fire their weapons after threats have been eliminated, and routinely delay medical care for people wounded in encounters with them. [Associated Press]
Six years after it became the site of one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, the 1200 Building at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, is being torn down. Community members have mixed emotions about the demolition — dueling desires to remember the victims and close a painful chapter. [WLRN]
“Accomplice liability” laws — which allow people who assisted in, but did not commit, a crime to be charged for it — make domestic violence victims particularly vulnerable to prosecution. For Pat Johnson, who says a longtime abuser pointed a gun at her before he killed three people, that meant being sentenced to life in prison. Johnson isn’t the only one. [The Marshall Project]
From 2014 to 2019, U.S. soldiers were almost nine times more likely to die by suicide than by enemy fire, according to a new Pentagon study examining the five-year period. The report found that suicide was the leading cause of death for active-duty soldiers, and that gunshot wounds accounted for 65 percent of the deaths. [USA TODAY]
Data Point
883 — the number of active-duty soldiers who died by suicide from 2014 to 2019. In that time period, there were 96 combat deaths. [USA TODAY]
